content: today’s talk is about history of an assessment method
- “the most boring topic that anyone could possibly. conceive of”
how to perform well in assessments by knowing the history of assessments
“knowing the hidden curriculum”
hidden curriculum: implicit/underemphasised requirements of assessment types
talk abt close reading today frfr trust
Cambridge
- Almost all teaching is 1 on 1
- occasionally there are seminars/lectures
- sometimes groups e.g. 2-3
- most important assessment is the practical exam
- all students doing english take this course
- regarded as methological center of what they do
- also part of the admissions process
- interview as well
- unseen text and ask u to comment on it
australia started close reading in 1940
by alex smth????
- did education at cambridge
- 2nd chair of languages
- chief examiner for english
- introduces assessment methods into schools
- he is the guy that we have to blame for doing close readings
- tytytyty u saved my lit grade
1920s
- decade where close reading/practical criticism/unseen text as assessment becomes part of the Cambridge curriculum
- blame i.a. richards
i.a. richards
- Started experiments
- gave 4 poems to students
- no names
- no titles
- no publication dates
- students did not identify them with very few exceptions
- he encouraged the students to go and read the poems any number of times
- had some weird instructions
- Comment in any form that they desire
- write down the number of times they read each of the 4 poems
- hinted that the poems were a mixed bunch
- some were good, some were not
- Students wrote short commentaries and submitted them to richards
- half were female half were male
- side not: his lectures were very popular
- he would give lectures not on the given poems, but on the responses of the students
- whole aim was the identify common interpreting errors in students’ commentary
- he was v committed and understanding of the difficulty of reading a poem
- hardest thing of creating a poem was creating the sense of a poem????
- richards is lecturing to WW1 veterans
- difficult for us to apprehend how big of a difference he made to those people who were experiencing ptsd after horrors of WW1
- richards had a vision of what poetry is and what it could do
- how did he get such good responses from his students waw
- his biographer, “john paul” has some suggestions
- point number 3 in given page
- basically he was analysing poems in a close, systematic way the most basic thing that he was getting students to do was to make out the plain sense/meaning of the poem
- his biographer, “john paul” has some suggestions
- this is the main thing that they want you to do
- move from literal to metaphorical