Wade Hampton Miller
2004-05-23 21:40:27 UTC
Here's an interesting essay, from the May 20, 2004 issue of the LA Times:
COMMENTARY
The Lobotomized Weasel School of Writing
By Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pa.
May 20, 2004
The other day, our 16-year-old son, struggling with his homework, asked his
mother this question: "Do you know how many paragraphs an American history
essay is supposed to have?"
The answer, of course, is one. Or seven. Or 700. Whatever.
But that is not what he has been taught; he's been told there's a correct
number. Once I was working with him on an essay and he told me we needed
exactly three arguments. No more, no fewer, although he did not know yet what
they might be.
Today's educational establishment is making actual illiteracy look good, like
an act of humanity and rebellion. Writing, which ought to nurture and give
shape to thought, is instead being used to pound it into a powder and then
reconstitute it into gruel.
The thoroughly modern grade-A public-school prose style is not creative or
interesting enough even to be wrong. The people who create and enforce the
templates are, not to put too fine a point on it, people without understanding
or imagination, lobotomized weasels for whom any effort of thought exceeds
their strength. I recently read one of the many boilerplate descriptions of how
students should write their essays. "The penultimate sentence," it said,
"should restate your basic thesis of the essay." Well, who says? And why?
The teaching of writing as a machine procedure gains momentum by the day. In
Indiana this year, the junior-year English essay will be graded by computer,
and similar experiments have been tried in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and
Oregon. The SAT and the ACT are planning to test the new computer-grading
software as well. That is a reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of
learning. If this is knowledge, then truth and beauty reside only in ignorance.
Vantage Learning, which makes the writing-assessment software called
Intellimetric, claims that it "shows more reliable and more consistent results
across samples than human expert scorers." Of course "reliable" entails
"accurate," and I daresay there is no way to establish that without begging all
possible questions.
More to the point, perhaps, machines are cheaper: It costs perhaps $5 for a
human being to evaluate an essay, $1 for a machine. And while it takes five to
10 minutes for a human to score an essay, the computer can apparently do it in
two seconds.
The actual procedures that the software employs are presumably proprietary. But
the dimensions that Intellimetric evaluates are these: (1) focus and unity; (2)
development and elaboration; (3) organization and structure; (4) sentence
structure; (5) mechanics and conventions.
One can imagine the way a computer assesses such things: The repetition of a
given word, for example, helps constitute unity, and the penultimate sentence
had better recapitulate the introduction in pretty much the same, recognizable
terms. There are to be three "supporting" paragraphs, and the relation of the
body of each to its "topic sentence" might again be assessed by word
repetition. "Development and elaboration" might, for example, be proportional
to the length of words, or of sentences.
The only real argument for the quality of the software is that it is "more
reliable and accurate" than human evaluators. But the human evaluators have
already transformed themselves into Intellimetric software: These are the
military sheep — their minds both rigid and woolly — who invented and
enforce the mind-numbing five-paragraph essay form.
Every child in the United States, more or less, is being taught to write and to
think in this way. I teach these kids when they reach college. I try to tell
them that the idea that there is some specifiable way to write an essay is just
hoo-ha made up by some bureaucrat in 1987. This makes them nervous.
I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today; if the world goes to
hell I don't really care. But I do care about coming to the middle of a
semester and being forced, in order to make a living, to read 35 five-page
papers written by thoroughly fried lamb chops whose writing style has been
nurtured over the years by a computer.
Obviously, if your no-child-left-behind funds depend on your test scores, you
will teach your kids to write essays that move a computer to tears. But the
idea that computers can grade essays in the first place is one that could only
have occurred to people who have no idea how to write or how to read, people
whose existence is redundant and hence indefensible: in short, the people who
administer the education of our children.
Feed THAT into your computer, chump.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Wade Hampton Miller
Chugiak, Alaska
Remove the "Howdy" to reply...
COMMENTARY
The Lobotomized Weasel School of Writing
By Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pa.
May 20, 2004
The other day, our 16-year-old son, struggling with his homework, asked his
mother this question: "Do you know how many paragraphs an American history
essay is supposed to have?"
The answer, of course, is one. Or seven. Or 700. Whatever.
But that is not what he has been taught; he's been told there's a correct
number. Once I was working with him on an essay and he told me we needed
exactly three arguments. No more, no fewer, although he did not know yet what
they might be.
Today's educational establishment is making actual illiteracy look good, like
an act of humanity and rebellion. Writing, which ought to nurture and give
shape to thought, is instead being used to pound it into a powder and then
reconstitute it into gruel.
The thoroughly modern grade-A public-school prose style is not creative or
interesting enough even to be wrong. The people who create and enforce the
templates are, not to put too fine a point on it, people without understanding
or imagination, lobotomized weasels for whom any effort of thought exceeds
their strength. I recently read one of the many boilerplate descriptions of how
students should write their essays. "The penultimate sentence," it said,
"should restate your basic thesis of the essay." Well, who says? And why?
The teaching of writing as a machine procedure gains momentum by the day. In
Indiana this year, the junior-year English essay will be graded by computer,
and similar experiments have been tried in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and
Oregon. The SAT and the ACT are planning to test the new computer-grading
software as well. That is a reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of
learning. If this is knowledge, then truth and beauty reside only in ignorance.
Vantage Learning, which makes the writing-assessment software called
Intellimetric, claims that it "shows more reliable and more consistent results
across samples than human expert scorers." Of course "reliable" entails
"accurate," and I daresay there is no way to establish that without begging all
possible questions.
More to the point, perhaps, machines are cheaper: It costs perhaps $5 for a
human being to evaluate an essay, $1 for a machine. And while it takes five to
10 minutes for a human to score an essay, the computer can apparently do it in
two seconds.
The actual procedures that the software employs are presumably proprietary. But
the dimensions that Intellimetric evaluates are these: (1) focus and unity; (2)
development and elaboration; (3) organization and structure; (4) sentence
structure; (5) mechanics and conventions.
One can imagine the way a computer assesses such things: The repetition of a
given word, for example, helps constitute unity, and the penultimate sentence
had better recapitulate the introduction in pretty much the same, recognizable
terms. There are to be three "supporting" paragraphs, and the relation of the
body of each to its "topic sentence" might again be assessed by word
repetition. "Development and elaboration" might, for example, be proportional
to the length of words, or of sentences.
The only real argument for the quality of the software is that it is "more
reliable and accurate" than human evaluators. But the human evaluators have
already transformed themselves into Intellimetric software: These are the
military sheep — their minds both rigid and woolly — who invented and
enforce the mind-numbing five-paragraph essay form.
Every child in the United States, more or less, is being taught to write and to
think in this way. I teach these kids when they reach college. I try to tell
them that the idea that there is some specifiable way to write an essay is just
hoo-ha made up by some bureaucrat in 1987. This makes them nervous.
I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today; if the world goes to
hell I don't really care. But I do care about coming to the middle of a
semester and being forced, in order to make a living, to read 35 five-page
papers written by thoroughly fried lamb chops whose writing style has been
nurtured over the years by a computer.
Obviously, if your no-child-left-behind funds depend on your test scores, you
will teach your kids to write essays that move a computer to tears. But the
idea that computers can grade essays in the first place is one that could only
have occurred to people who have no idea how to write or how to read, people
whose existence is redundant and hence indefensible: in short, the people who
administer the education of our children.
Feed THAT into your computer, chump.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Wade Hampton Miller
Chugiak, Alaska
Remove the "Howdy" to reply...