point of view and multiple choice questions

I know writers of multiple choice questions cover themselves by including verbiage such as: which choice best identifies...

Even so, I wonder how aligned that kind of question is to the spirit of a lot of good literature.

I just finished reading Mockingjay. It's intense, ambiguous in some ways, very rich material for discussing what one would do in one of the many difficult, no-win situations in the story.

So I started thinking about Suzanne Collins's point of view and purpose-- how she might express these if she were talking about her work, and how a multiple choice question writer for a major high-stakes standardized test would write a question... and how the multiple choice question writer would decide to write the correct answer, the one that best identifies the author's purpose (in one question) and point of view (in another).

And why it is considered valuable for a student to "correctly" choose the question-writer's best answer and not be allowed to compose a response that states and explains what the student sees as the author's positions.  Of course that kind of stuff can't be graded by a machine and it allows for too much difference of opinion.

I'm kind of rambling here, but the thought that started this is:

I think lots of good fiction writers write to tell a great story and also to get their readers to think about ways of being and thinking vicariously. A reader's readiness ( on innumerable levels) will affect a reader's responses.

Our education system, our assessment "system" is obsessed with what isn't worth measuring (or isn't measurable), but is immeasurably worth pondering and discussing.

I wonder what Suzanne Collins would say about this, about why she wrote these three powerful books.
a) to make readers distrust absolute authority
b) to make readers shun violence as a solution
c) to make lots of money and increase her fame
d) to make readers value the lives they have and live them as fully as possible

math and us

I found a new blog to absorb.  It's by a math teacher. I watched his talk on TED

and went to his blog and have been there on and off for about 4 hours.

Here's the post (of many I could choose) that I think is for me now

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=5781

and an excerpt; for algebra, substitute reading, grammar, literature, composition, spelling, etc.

3. This kind of algebra makes our students dumb, unimaginative, and scared of real problems. At the end of the model lesson, the coach put up our homework, which was a carbon copy of the original problem, new numbers swapped in for the old. ¶ I can't describe my contempt for this arrangement. ¶ This is how we make kids stupid and impatient with irresolution, eager for contrived problems that look just like the last contrived problem, completely lost if we so much as switch around the order of a few words. "We don't teach them problem solving skills anymore," my department head said to me. "We teach them problem types."

Algebra teachers sell students a cheap distortion of the real world while insisting at the same time that it really is the real world. The cognitive dissonance is obvious and terrible. Students know the difference. It cheapens my relationship to them and their relationship to mathematics when you ask me to lie to them.

It's like offering someone lust or manipulation while insisting that it's love. Not only are the short-term consequences devastating but it makes that person distrustful or wary of the real thing. Make no mistake. We are making an alien of algebra. We are doing real damage here.

This kind of thinking will change what I do and how I do it even more.

I/we/you

I use this all the time. But I have probably never explained it to students. It's so obviously beneficial to me that I cannot imagine it's not equally obvious to them. But experience indicates they are clueless about how I teach using this structure.

So a near-term experiment is to be explicit about what I am doing and what students should do and get when I use this structure.


down-side-- this structure requires students to give attention to me. So often this year, and increasingly as the year gets closer to its end, I sense many students simply putting in time, thinking they are doing me a huge favor by just sitting and not causing problems. Sensing this is toxic to the spirit of my interaction; I never know how or if I'll be able to get through the cloud to connect with the other hearts and minds in the room.  also I just looked yesterday at the overall results of the three FAIR tests. I am devastated by how many students went down over the course of their year with me. If I am effective, I don't seem to be effective in what FAIR measures. so now what???