English teacher Justin Parmenter writes that creative writing is one of the victims of standardized testing and data-driven mania.
He writes:
“Educators are under enormous pressures stemming from a data-driven culture most recently rooted in No Child Left Behind and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, in which the ultimate measure of professional and academic success is a standardized test score. As a result of this standardized testing culture, many of our English students spend way too much time reading random passages which are completely detached from their lives and answering multiple choice questions in an attempt to improve test results. In many classrooms, writing has become little more than an afterthought. Creative writing, in particular, is seen by some as a frivolous waste of time because its value is so difficult to justify with data.
“Two decades before the advent of No Child Left Behind, the research of influential literacy professor Gail Tompkins identified seven compelling reasons why children should spend time writing creatively in class:
*to entertain
*to foster artistic expression
*to explore the functions and values of writing
*to stimulate imagination
*to clarify thinking
*to search for identity
*to learn to read and write
“The majority of Tompkins’s outcomes of creative writing could never be measured on today’s standardized tests. Indeed, over the same period that standardized reading tests have pushed writing in English classes to the sidelines, efforts to evaluate student writing on a broad, systematic scale have dwindled. Measuring student writing is expensive, and accurately assessing abstract thinking requires human resources most states aren’t willing to pony up. It’s much cheaper to score a bubble sheet.
“Measurement and assessment aside, the soft skills that we cultivate through regular creative writing with our students have tremendous real-world application as well as helping to promote the kind of atmosphere we want in our classrooms. After many years as an English teacher, I’ve found that carving out regular time for creative writing in class provides benefits for me and my students that we simply don’t get from other activities.”
Writing is thinking, put to paper or screen, with the opportunity to clarify and edit one’s thoughts. It can’t be taught by formula or by rote. It is a joy for some, a struggle for others. It is a luxury available to all. There is reward in knowing that your thoughts matter.
Not everyone will become a writer, but everyone needs to learn how to express his or her thoughts clearly. Everyone has a voice. Everyone must learn how and when to use it. These are lessons that standardized tests can neither teach nor test.
As mathematician Roger Penrose (who wrote a seminal paper with Stephen Hawking) has pointed out, computers can potentially do pretty much everything humans do, with one exception: understand.
How does a computer help someone to understand or even know if they understand if it cannot itself understand what it is teaching?
It not only can’t understand what it is teaching, but it also can’t understand whom it is teaching — or even that it is a “who” and not an “it”.
That’s a very big problem for teachers based on AI today — and it might continue to be a big problem for AI in the future.
Penrose thinks the problem is actually intractable.He has argued (based, among other things, on a famous mathematical theorem by Goedel) that “knowing/understanding” is actually the result of a “noncomputable” process and therefore outside the realm of possibility for ANY computer, no matter how advanced and powerful.
This has obvious relevance to the whole “standardized testing” issue as well.
How does one know when a student really understands something?
A teacher can recognize it fairly quickly with some probing questions and/or by reading something a student has written.
But the recognition comes not just from whether the answers that the student gave are “correct” and or from whether a piece of writing is grammatically correct) but far more so from how the student answered (and whether what they wrote is meaningful), indicating the student’s thought process.
With all standardized tests using multiple choice questions, the decision about whether a student understands must be based purely on questions answered “correctly”. Unless the students work is shown AND a knowledgable human reads it there can be no insight into the thought processes that went into the answer.
Those thought processes are far more important than “right” answers.
But neither standardized tests nor artificial intelligence can gauge such thought processes.
Well said, SomeDAM. Yes. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that these people who are so into measurement understand so little about it. Ironic and, given what’s happening to our students, tragic.
“. . . that these people who are so into measurement understand so little about it. Ironic. . .”
I wouldn’t call it ironic. Maybe ignorant, although stupid might be more accurate.
The reason that those who believe in “measuring” student learning don’t have a clue about what that supposed “measurement” entails is because they are attempting to do the impossible. How can one “measure” anything without an agreed upon standard unit of measurement (pound, inch, kilo, meter, etc. . .) nor without any measuring device that is calibrated against an exemplar of that agreed upon standard unit?
Someone please tell me what the agreed upon standard unit of learning is. . . .
. . . . . .
. . . . .
YEP, just what I thought, no one can state what that standard unit of learning is. . . because there is none.
So, it’s not really ironic for them not to understand “measuring” student learning. It can only be considered a form of rationo-logical mental breakdown to believe in “measuring” student learning. Or should I just say it is IDIOTIC to believe there is.
Re standard unit of learning
It’s not that there is none, but rather, that it is “none”, quite literally.
It is {} — the empty set.
It is the only unit with the proper characteristic. Namely, no matter how many units you specify, the answer is always empty.
My brother keeps asking me why his children have assigned reading in their classes. Why do all the students have to read MacBeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, etc, if they find these books boring. (I’m not sure if my nephew would find any fiction book interesting and he’s in for a shock when he takes Freshman English in college).
What should I tell him?
Those are all pretty darned interesting books! But here are a couple reasons:
These are all works that have appealed strongly to millions of people over extended periods of time–for decades and even, in the case of Macbeth, for centuries. So, your brother should be asking himself what millions of others have seen in these works that he missed. The chances are that he was not willing to take the author’s trip, when he encountered these, and so to have the imaginative experience that so moved all those people as to make these into what people refer to, crudely, as classics.
Being familiar with these works is a matter of cultural literacy. Their ideas are touchstones, and they are often alluded to. If a person doesn’t know these and other classic works, then there will be much that he or she will encounter, in literature and in life, that will not be understood.
I am one of the few literary types who is not a fan of Catcher. I find the central character insufferable. But I recognize that the book is well wrought. Salinger was a gifted fellow.
Bob, I really dislike Catcher in the Rye too.
“To read or not to read (fiction)”
To read or not to read — that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fiction
Or to take arms against a sea of Caulfields
And by opposing end them. To play video games, to sleep–
Yes more! –and by a sleep to say we kill
The Flies, and the thousand Mocking birds
That fiction is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To game, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep what dreams may come
Of things that might have been had we only read Macbeth
Must give us pause. THERE’s the thing
That drives home the value of reading fiction
You can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Reading makes one smart.
Depends on the reading and what you consider “smart”, eh!
We hope that is the case but from what I’ve seen many people read and end up, well, let’s just say not smarter due to the type of reading.
Flos,
Gary Shteyngart (wonderful novelist) has a bookish character who says books, unlike our phones, computers and other entertaining technology, allow him to “get into the mind of their author”. I’m rereading “Great Expectations” now, and I feel I’m seeing the world through Charles Dickens’ eyes. All of his wisdom and judgements about society and humans, the good life and the bad life, can be inferred from his writing. I suppose some of this wisdom could be transmitted via non-fiction (e.g. essays), but literature seems more efficient. Also stories tend to be more memorable than expository text. The story and characters smolder in the long term memory where later life experience can kindle insights about it that you might not have had while reading. Just as the benefits of a healthy food diet are not immediately evident, the benefits of a nutritious brain diet are not immediately evident. Your brother ought to trust the tradition on this.
When I was young, my aunt used to take me to “fancy” restaurants and make me try different foods. All I wanted was a burger and fries. She used to take me to museums and the opera and the Boston Pops and Yankees games. She took me to New York and Boston and many great places. I didn’t appreciate it then because I was a kid. But now, looking back, I am so grateful for those experiences. As I got older, I began to enjoy many of those things and started to be curious about other things as well. Kids always think things are “boring.” But they won’t be kids forever. Having a broad range of experiences will help them as adults. So, just tell your brother to encourage them and keep exposing them to wonderful things.
Nice analogy, Marnie.
Are people just DAFT?
Thank you, Mr. Parmenter, for this eloquent and sane defense of traditional instruction in English, which is almost dead thanks to the standards-and-testing regime. Indeed, kids are spending their days not doing engaging reading and writing but, instead, reading isolated snippets of random text and answering multiple-choice questions about these passages. In other words, English class has been replaced by test prep class. It’s meant the death of our field.
David Coleman, who never taught an English class in his life and so was chosen by Bill Gates to create the current de facto national standards [sic], famously asserted that fictional narrative writing isn’t important, and this is one of the many thousands of ways in which he showed how completely clueless he is. One way to come to understand something is to do it yourself, and it’s very important that young people come to understand stories. Why? Because storytelling is how we make sense of the world and form our own ego identities.
One of the many things that Coleman didn’t know about ELA (one could make a very long list there) is that getting a handle on narrative is essential. He decided unilaterally, for the rest of us, to de-emphasize narrative in favor of argument.
Narrative is arguably the primary means by which we make sense of the world. Let me tell you a story
Not so long ago. . .
The world was completely different.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years.But only since the end of the eighteenth century has artificial lighting been widely used. Gas lamps were introduced in European cities about that time, and electric lights came into use only in the twentieth century.
In other words, for most of human history, when night fell, it fell hard. Things got really, really dark. . .
and people gathered under the stars, which they could REALLY see in those days before electric lights. . .
and under those stars, they gathered around fires and told stories.In every culture around the globe. . .
Storytelling existed LONG before the invention of writing. We know this because the earliest manuscripts that we have in every case record stories that were ancient then.
Where does this storytelling urge among humans come from, and why is it universal?
Contemporary cognitive scientists have learned that storytelling is an essential faculty of the human mind, involved in every aspect of our lives, including our dreams, memories, and beliefs about ourselves and the world.
Storytelling turns out to be the fundamental way in which our brains are organized to make sense of our experience. Only in very recent years have scientists come to understand this. We are ESSENTIALLY storytelling creatures. We are Homo vates, man the storyteller.
If that sounds like an overstatement, attend to what I am about to tell you. It’s amazing, and it will make you rethink a LOT of what you think you know. When you look out at the world, you have the impression of taking everything in and seeing a continuous field.
But scientists have discovered that in fact, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment. The brain FILLS IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information and beliefs about the world. In short, your brain tells you a STORY about what you are seeing, and that is what you actually “see.”
Again, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment, even though there are literally millions and millions of things that they could be thinking about or attending to. This limitation of our mental processors to seven bits of information at a time is why telephone numbers are typically seven digits long. That’s the most information that people can attend to at any particular moment. So, at any given moment, you are attending to only a few small bits of your environment, and your brain is FILLING IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information, to create a complete picture for you. In short, your brain is continuously telling you a STORY about what you are seeing. The rods and cones at the back of your eye that take in visual information are interrupted by a place where the optic nerve connects to your brain. In other words, there is a blind spot where NO INFORMATION AT ALL IS AVAILABLE, but your brain automatically fills that information in for you. It tells you a story about what’s there.
The same thing happens when you remember something. Your brain only stores PARTS of the VERY FEW THINGS that you attend to in your present moments. Then, when you remember something, it CONFABULATES—it makes up a complete, whole story of what was PROBABLY the case and presents a whole memory to you, with many of the gaps filled in. In other words, memory is very, very, very faulty and based upon the storytelling
Years ago, I had a dream that I was flying into the island of Cuba on a little prop plane. Through the window, I could see the island below the plane. It looked like a big, white sheet cake, floating in an emerald sea. Next to me on the airplane sat a big, red orangutan with a golf club.
Weird, huh? So why did I have that dream? Well, in the days preceding the dream I had read a newspaper story about the Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, being ill; I had flown on a small prop plane; I had attended a wedding where there was a big, white sheet cake; I had been to the zoo with my grandson, where we saw an orangutan; and I had played golf with some friends.
The neural circuits in my brain that had recorded these bits and pieces were firing randomly in my sleeping brain, and the part of the brain that does storytelling was working hard, trying to piece these random fragments together into a coherent, unified story.
That’s the most plausible current explanation of why dreams occur. They make use of this storytelling function of the brain.
Who you are—your very SELF—is a story that your brain tells you about yourself and your history and your relations to others—a story with you as the main character. The story you tell yourself about yourself becomes the PERSON you are.
The word person, by the way, comes from persona—the Latin word for a mask worn by an actor in the Roman theatre (which was, in turn, based on Greek theatre).
So, our very idea of ourselves, of our own personal identity, is dependent upon this storytelling capacity of the human brain, which takes place automatically.
In fact, there is a new form of psychotherapy called cognitive narrative therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing, affirmative stories about themselves, about who they are.
Telling yourself the right kinds of stories about yourself and others can unlock your creative potential, improve your relationships, and help you to self create—to be the person you want to be.
So, storytelling is key to being human. It’s one of our essential characteristics. It’s deeply embedded in our brains. It fills every aspect of our lives. Years ago, the historiographer Hayden White, in an essay called “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact,” pointed out that we tell ourselves that we’ve understood historical events once we have imposed a narrative frame upon them.
We make sense of the world via storytelling.
So it’s no wonder that people throughout history have told stories. People are made to construct stories—plausible and engaging accounts of things—the way a stapler is made to staple and a hammer is made to hammer. We are truly Homo vates, man the storyteller.
Storytelling is an essential, or defining characteristic of our species, one of those things that makes a human a human.
But Coleman understood nothing of that, clearly. And he didn’t understand how important it is for young people to become adept at this ability to formulate stories and to subject them to critique.
Why is anyone taking him at all seriously?
Well said. No bubble test will ever teach humans the craft of writing.
Or to understand that they must take control of the stories that they tell themselves about who they and other people are. This stuff is very, very deep and important.
“A Brief History of Man”
First came Homo erectus
A relative of old
And now the Homo testus
Is mining kids for gold
You forgot to fit homo supposedly sapiens in there.
I said brief, not complete.
“An updated complete, un-abridged History of Man”
First came Homo erectus
A relative of old
Then came Homo bestus,
“Sapiens” we’re told
And now the Homo testus
Is mining kids for gold
There does that make you happy?
“The neural circuits in my brain that had recorded these bits and pieces were firing randomly in my sleeping brain,”
I’m not so sure that those firings are necessarily “random”.
Now that is not to suggest that our conscious mind orders or controls those firings, just that perhaps there are patterns/reasons that we may never uncover, or should I say likely will never uncover.
Bob, what I take away from your interesting post here is not so much that we need to have kids write stories as that we need to have kids listen to stories about our past, about science, about important people, from novels, etc. In other words, that our schools’ pedagogy would be more beneficial and effective if it consisted of more adults’ telling stories. Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham suggests this in his book “Why Do Kids Hate School?”. Unfortunately, current “best practice” dictates the precise opposite: less teacher talk; more “wrestling” with difficult chunks for text from which little coherent narrative can emerge (the idea –half-baked and unscientific –is that this struggle will build mental muscles).
Yes. What an insane, counterproductive approach we are now taking!!! In many schools, there are no English classes anymore. As you know, those have been replaced by test prep using random, isolated snippets of text.
This is HORRIBLE, a felony crime that should come with a death sentence for the corporate reformers after torturing those same monsters with what the ancient Chinese called death by 10,000 cuts.
If they crush the imaginations of children, they crush the children’s spirits and their ability to think critically, solve problems. and innovate.
Here is recent news on reading comprehension. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) is a new reading comprehension dataset, “consisting of questions posed by crowd workers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage. With 100,000+ question-answer pairs on 500+ articles, SQuAD is significantly larger than previous reading comprehension datasets.” https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/
With SQuAD as the notion of a “reading comprehension “ test, the press has recycled press releases from tech companies who are comparing the performance of humans versus two artificial intelligence (AI) systems, one from Microsoft, one from the Chinese tech company Alibaba.
By a small margin, the two IA systems beat humans on offering the “correct” answer,” to a computer generated question. To be more precise, humans and AI systems came up with an “exactly matching answer to questions generated by a predictive algorithm, called a neural network—specifically a “Heirarchical Attention Network.”
That grandiose language refers to a computer programmed to read “from paragraphs to sentences to words” (in that order) and in order to identify phrases that could hold potential answers to a limited subset of questions.
“Alibaba IDST’s chief scientist of natural language processing Si Luo, said: That means objective questions such as ‘what causes rain’ can now be answered with high accuracy by machines. We believe the technology underneath can be gradually applied to numerous applications such as customer service, museum tutorials, and online responses to medical inquiries from patients, decreasing the need for human input in an unprecedented way.’”
Perhaps. But it is worth noting that SQuAD offers the “training data” for this machine-learning competition. The data comes from topics in Wikipedia. Whether that source is accurate, reliable, and attentive to cultural bias seems not to have been questioned, and it should be. Even if Wikipedia is a trustworthy source, it is clear to me that the topics selected from Wikipedia are not a random selection.
At the SQuAD website, the 50 topics in the data set are visually presented as if they are not organized. I entered these topics in a spreadsheet, then assigned a domain identity to each topic: 11 topics were about history, 9 science, 8 geography, 6 technology, 4 each for political science and education, with 2 topics each for math, religion, and popular culture. In this exercise, I also discovered topics varied in generality within a domain (e.g., geology, chloroplast within science; Kenya, Warsaw within geography).
The SQuAD dataset consists of computer-digestible chunks of within a longer Wikipedia entry. Each chunk, about 150 words, is called a context paragraph. The computer is programmed to generate questions and answers from that text, then from individual sentences, and then words.
It should come as no surprise that the computer-generated questions and answers for these chunks of text focus on questions in the form of who, what, where, and when along with definitions of terms, and simple classifications (x is an example of y). Internet search engines are doing much of the same work (and they routinely make false predictions about what I am looking for and want to find).
Computer programmers like to refer to instructions embedded in code as “neural networks,” as examples of “deep learning,” as breakthroughs in processing “natural language,” and as the best way to “personalize learning.” I am not a computer expert but if the SQuAD test is supposed to be a major achievement, I am underwhelmed.
In addition to Microsoft and Alibaba others are competing to win bragging rights in the SQuAD competiton, including Tencent (China), Google, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Tel-Aviv University, and South Korea’s Kangwon National University. http://www.zdnet.com/article/alibaba-neural-network-defeats-human-in-global-reading-test/
Computers don’t “comprehend” anything so to call what they are doing “reading comprehension” is basically a lie.
Nothing new for the people who produce this stuff, who regularly exaggerate and even lie to get government contracts and sell products.
I think it’s kind of funny to hear about this grand effort to make computers comprehend texts when most of the education establishment doesn’t understand how to get humans to comprehend texts. This two-decade foray into teaching reading skills ad nauseam has been a bust, as evidenced by NAEP scores. Common Core ELA fosters a continuation of this failed approach. Maybe the AI researchers will school the ed school professors.
I find the profession of English teaching to be in a Dark Ages. The NCTE magazine and website appall me with misguided groupthink. There is little fruitful debate or discussion going on. Writing Workshop is sacrosanct, even though it seems to be largely a failure: college freshmen still can’t write. What REALLY makes a good writer? The conventional answer is minilessons and endless practice (that’s what Writing Workshop is). But it seems to me the TRUE foundation of writing ability is a broad multi-disciplinary education (this gives you something to say) and reading (this gives you models of how to write). Practice is a piece of the puzzle, but just a piece –and probably not the most important piece.
“I find the profession of English teaching to be in a Dark Ages.”
Really?
I taught English for most of 30 years and still don’t what the NCTE Magazine is (And no one in the English department used it — in the entire school district probably. That’s probably why I never heard of it.), and I taught kids to understand what they read, and also taught them how to write by making the writing relevant and personal. The kind of writing that David Colemaqn alleged, “No one gives a shit what you think”.
In fact, all the English teachers I knew and met were into creating their own material with a passion, and that material was much better than the crap someone else churned out for them on a corporate assembly line. We had textbooks but few teachers actually used the Q&A that followed each piece and preferred to write their own lesson with into, through and beyond in mind because creating a lesson like that encourages students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers.
And did my students learn to write? I was told repeatedly (with evidence the district collected), “Yes.”
Lloyd, there are plenty of good English teachers out there; I’m sure you were one of them. When I say the profession is in the Dark Ages, I mean the discourse at the level of education schools and professional journals seems benighted to me.
After I earned my teaching credential, I never kept up with the ed department at that university. Once I started teaching, no time. Why go back anyway? I only went to earn the credential.
Once in the classroom, teaching English consumes you totally, and I never subscribed to “professional journals” so I don’t know much about them. From what I remember, most “professional journals” have small audiences who are mostly PhD’s desperate to get published so they have something to put on their resumes to get hired to teach in a college as an adjunct professor with no job security, and I wonder if anyone reads what they write. I read one in thirty years from an old high school friend who ended up earning a PhD and landing a job at a college. That was the last one I read. What he wrote was a waste of time since his audience would have to read at the PhD level to possibly understand him with no guarantee that they would.
Most if not all English teachers in traditional public education don’t have time for that “crap” (my words for it).