Dec 6, 2009
If everyone fails, it’s the teacher’s fault.
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Imagine a chemistry quiz that accomplished working chemists could not pass.… I myself would question its author’s competence at devising chemistry quizzes.
-Chris Potts’s thoughts on a nonsensically abstruse grammar quiz by David Foster Wallace
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Many teachers – like myself – are tempted to blame the students when they fail. “Well, he didn’t study.” “They never do their homework.” “I went over this in class.”
Sometimes we even put the blame on previous teachers. “What did they teach them last year?!” “I know you learned this in middle school.”
One good lesson that I learned from a college professor is this: Usually, teachers are more responsible than they’d like to acknowledge for their students’ failures.
Guaranteed: If every student misses the same question on a test, it wasn’t taught in a comprehensible way.
It’s amazing how good teachers can get results from students who no one else can motivate.
It’s not my fault when a student fails, unless I’m a crappy teacher.
I don’t think Jason Kottke thought hard enough about the questions before looking at the answers.
He’s a smart guy but he also loves DFW, and I believe he was too quick to investigate how much smarter DFW was than himself.
True, but the quiz is still bunk.
It’s an exercise in understanding the mind of an elitist language snob (or SNOOT, as DFW labels himself), not understanding Standard Written English.
And I say that having read DFW’s essay on grammar and appreciating it quite a bit.
Tough to know without attending the class and experiencing how he prepared his students for it…but what if the quiz was really more about mindfulness and choices than it was about rules?
I mean, whether writing students can’t reliably put together complete sentences (like lots of mine), or whether they are using arcana haphazardly (like his, maybe), they’ll have fewer options and less mastery as they write if they don’t pay attention to different ways a thing can be expressed.
So, yeah, it is about the teacher and what he was trying to accomplish.
KP
Also, I think the parallel to a chemistry quiz is bunk. I like the Language Log commenter’s comparison to a DMV exam better. (The one by “Disappointed” at 10.20 on Dec 5.)
KP
i disagree, because DFW’s quiz is a written test about writing. i’m sure i could pass the DMV’s driving test.
Good point about the sort of test it is.
The reason I like the DMV comparison is that (like a grammar quiz) the DMV test standardizes a dynamic, lived experience into apparently straightforward matters of right and wrong. (Can’t say the same thing about the hard sciences, can you? Dopeslap me here if I’m wrong, chemists.)
Everyone knows that right driving is not always the same thing as effective driving. But I think it’s also true that some mindfulness of right driving makes a necessary contribution to effective driving. And too much, sabotages it.
Same with writing. A teacher’s got to know his/her students and emphasize what will help them.
KP
p.s. I’m not sure at all that I’d pass the driving test right now. Too much muscle memory from too many rolling stops, U-ies over the double-yellow, 9-point 3-point turns, and unsignaled lane changes.
I’m still an effective driver, though. ;-)
In college my logic professor wrote tests that challenged him. He then had to curve the tests. I earned a D once and ended up with a B+. That is just wrong.
I am now an educator. Recently, just last week actually, I assigned a test where the class average was a 70%. Three possible conclusions arose in my head: either I am a bad teacher, I do not know how to write a test, or the student’s did not study.
If everyone fails a question, it is my fault by not explaining the concept enough, or I did not communicate what I was looking for either (perhaps both)
If teachers write tests, quizzes, etc. in a bad way, they must be prepared to rescue their students grade. Ego must be let go. And every teacher has a decent amount of that.
re: this post and not DFW’s—just the other day i was discussing with some other students the difference between science grading and humanities grading (at our school and many other schools we know of). science exams seem to aim for the majority of the class to get around 50-70% of the questions right. they are also almost always curved, so that no matter how well or how poorly the entire class does, the majority of students will get a B- or C letter grade. meanwhile, in the humanities, if you’re not getting at least a B, you are (or the prof is) doing something wrong, and there is rarely any curve. thus the humanities are often accused of grade inflation, but it seems impossible (in the sciences) for a bad professor to be held accountable—everyone’s so used to doing terribly.
I recall a stats exam in college in which the whole class received Ds and Fs. (The professor admitted he made the test too difficult.) I had received an A on every other exam, but ended up with a B/C in the class. I never thought that was fair…
Two thoughts:
(1) The test wasn’t that hard. And before anyone asks, the alst time I took an English class was in high school… it’s been a while. I easily spotted 8/10 of those issues, knew how to resolve 7 of those, and was accurately wondering if the problem was where it actually was for the 9th. Perhaps I’m just a pedantic nerd, however.
(2) Tests in general: yes, teachers should do their best to write good tests. Especially in the hard sciences, that’s difficult, though. No professor should fail to take into account class averages and scores when thinking about whether grades should be curved. In my physics curriculum in high school, it was not rare 40%’s to be B’s. The challenge, of course, was for the professors to recognize what would constitute a hard problem for the students – because they were themselves intimately involved with those same concepts, and all the problems were trivial to them.