I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems | The Huffington Post

I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems | The Huffington Post

Remember when standardized tests asked only questions that had an objective, unambigious answer? Test companies got bored with that, so now you get multiple-choice questions on subjective interpretations of texts, rather than objective questions that are answered by the text's content, and poet Sara Holbrook, whose work was used in this way, is unhappy about it.

"Oh, goody. I'm a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I'm a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

"These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids' futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions....

"The only way to stop this nonsense is for parents to stand up and say, no more. No more will I let my kid be judged by random questions scored by slackers from Craigslist while I pay increased taxes for results that could just as easily have been predicted by an algorithm. That's not education, that's idiotic....

"My final reflection is this: any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich. Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can't protest. But I'm not dead.

"I protest."