I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it&#x27;s even true for authors that are still alive.<p>Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing.<p>Hell, I&#x27;m pretty certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more. Not all of them are pondering, rewriting every line. And even the ones that do don&#x27;t necessarily do it for the result the teacher expects.<p>And as a kid, you certainly can&#x27;t say a classic author is not interesting. You can&#x27;t say the text is boring, that you don&#x27;t see talent in it, that you didn&#x27;t learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it&#x27;s good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don&#x27;t. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what&#x27;s school is supposed to teach.<p>We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It&#x27;s because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it.<p>People that felt like that usually went the science road. It&#x27;s not a bad thing, but it&#x27;s a positive feedback loop. It means fields in desperate needs of honesty and pragmatism are  only welcoming bullshiters and conformists.