Monthly Archives: January 2017

The Poet and the Test

My kids have attended school their entire lives under No Child Left Behind, and more recently the Common Core. They are now in 7th and 9th grade. Each spring they undergo a barrage of preparation and testing assessments. It is easy for a young person to equate these measures of academic ability with a measure of their value as a human being.

I’ve seen it in my own kids. They encounter a baffling question in homework or a practice test, and they feel dumb. If I happen to be there when these questions come up, I don’t feel dumb and I don’t think they should either. I know better. Sometimes the questions are way off base. They are ill-conceived or even just plain wrong. They simply don’t measure what they purport to measure.

Today I read an article by Sarah Holbrook, a writer and poet whose work was used on a standardized reading test, and she couldn’t answer the questions about her own work. Why couldn’t she answer the questions? Because, she says,

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.

How is this kind of testing fair to kids and their teachers? I’ve tried to teach my kids not to put too much weight into this stuff. I teach them coping mechanisms. I teach them to simply do the best they know how to do and to not worry about individual questions that are troubling. I tell them the tests are composed by semi-literate monkeys and they shouldn’t worry what the monkeys think. I tell them if they don’t know the answer, just say “potato.” Or on a multiple choice test, they can use the four finger test by slapping four fingers on the desk, and whichever finger hurts the most denotes an A, B, C or D for the answer.

Mostly we just joke around about it and I tell them not to worry too much about the tests. But they still worry. I think it’s sad that kids go through their entire education with this cloud of this testing hanging over them. And I have to wonder if this testing environment isn’t at least in part to blame for my college students’ obsession with getting the “right” answer, instead of having a curious mind willing to ask questions and think deeply?

If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and compulsory standardized testing would stop. We would respect teaching as a profession. Educators would be responsible for the assessment of their pupils, not for-profit businesses who put the bottom line ahead of kids.

Rifftrax and Birdemic

A number of years ago, I heard about the so-awful-it’s-good movie Birdemic. It has been on my watch list ever since, and over the Christmas break I finally got a chance to watch it. The movie has been billed as “The worst movie ever made” and justly so. It is truly bad.The screenplay is bad. The acting is bad. The directing is bad. The editing is bad. The special effects are bad.

Here is an excerpt to give you a taste of how deliciously awful Birdemic is:

Now why would I want to see such a disaster? Well, for one thing, I teach digital media technology. In our program, we learn about film editing, digital storytelling and special effects. With Birdemic, I was thinking we could analyze a film that someone spent time and money to produce, discussing the things that went wrong, and how could things be improved. After seeing it, I’m imagining there won’t be enough class time for a comprehensive analysis unless we devote an entire semester to it. However, we can look at some excerpts and explore the possibilities presented to digital film makers.

One recurring theme in the courses that I teach is that of “working digitally” or doing digital work professionally. Because it is an emerging field, the possibilities are endless. I want students to begin to imagine the kinds of work that can be done using digital media technologies.

Birdemic was created by James Nguyen, a silicon valley software engineer with a dream. Through persistence and audaciousness, his film became a reality. Using social media and publicity stunts at the Sundance film festival, the film was picked up by a distributor, screened in several cities, released on DVD, and by all accounts became far more successful than what should normally be expected. So count Mr. Nguyen as a visionary of what “working digitally” looks like.

I also have a second example of how “working digitally” is associated with the Birdemic film. I’ve been aware of the Rifftrax comedy website for several years. The business model for Rifftrax is to create comedy sound tracks to play along with commercially released DVDs. If you are familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, aka MST3K, you know how this works – basically it is a group of wise-crackers joking around about movies they are watching. After the MST3K television show ended, the Rifftrax website was launched. Below is a sample of how Rifftrax works with the Birdemic film. We see scenes from Birdemic together with the jokes by Rifftrax.

Normally, one buys, borrows or rents a dvd to watch, and downloads an MP3 joke soundtrack to play along with the movie. Over the break, I got the Birdemic film, downloaded the Rifftrax mp3, and had a great time watching this awful movie. But I think it is a perfect example of people doing digital work, creating a product that no one could ever even imagine before computers and the internet.