Explanations offered to the exposition

Al Filreis

Okay, quick. Take this SAT question. Answer. If you selected D, you were right and should consider retaking the test after all these years. Do you even remember the damned things? I remember the pencil. It hurt to hold it so tightly for so long. I remember having a mantra that I would repeat to myself so that I would concentrate and do well. I remember having the mantra, but I forget the mantra. (The thing about mantras.)

Yes, D is correct. I bring this to you from an email I receive every morning at 6 AM. Think about being greeting by such a thing in your inbox upon awaking. It’s for my son who is in the SAT season and this is the extent of his prep: I print out “Your SAT question of the day” for him, along with the answer, and he does them at breakfast. Like a vitamin, one a day. Or an innoculation against incorrectness.

D is correct, they SAT folks tell you, because the words filling the blanks are supposed to be opposites. If explanations are one thing, it is unfair to treat them as the opposite. They are incidental and cannot be treated as the opposite of incidental, namely essential. Got it?

By the time I myself “took” the question, 4,459 others had tried their hand at answering. That’s a lot for this early in the morning. I’m printing it out for my son, and in order to get to the answer page, which I also print for him, I have to click on an answer (usually I choose randomly, just to get to the answer page and unconcerned about getting the right answer for myself!). On the answer page they show you a pie chart of the correct and incorrect answers so far. A whopping fifty-six percent got this one wrong.

I would opt for F if I had the opportunity. Leave the adjectives out. Here’s the result:

Since the explanations offered are to the exposition, it would be unfair to treat them as parts of the studies under consideration.

Who needs this kind of lame opposition anyway? Frankly, I think the “correct” answer seems intended to make lawyers out of all our children. I’m being entirely serious. I’m putting my incorrect parental shoulder to the wheel!

October 22, 2008

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.