Love minus one

I was talking to my friend who was teaching lit, and he complained about how difficult the tests were, and how unfair they are to kids. and i took a look at the lit paper and it's insanely difficult. so share his sentiment that the questions are really unfair. besides, i never respected lit questions much, i always could feel some of the sentiment but you know i've been hopelessly wrong before.

but the key thing is, there was a boy who got 0 (assuming no moderation and all). 0/20. kosong. How do you bring back a test paper with 0 on it for your parents to sign? What's wrong. Do you know zero (nothing)? I'm not for political correctness, failure is failure, but I mean, clearly something is wrong if someone has 0 and he has attempted the questions. and bear in mind, it's not an essay which has gone completely out of point...

the key thing is, we make tests so difficult. is it to prepare kids for some imaginary life out there? come on. when someone gets 0/20, they're going to cry (heard he did). They're never going to love lit (well, unless they're astonishingly stoic and mature about it, though i doubt), if you effectively tell them, well, you suck, forget it, you can't even get a single mark! Some real poor German you are.

My favourite meaningless quote about the topic has to be

"You know there's no success like failure, well but failure's no success at all."

Clearly we learn from failure, but I don't think it's nice to assume necessarily that we need to make people fail to learn... come on...

That's from Dylan by the way, I was watching unplugged and he was performing. lovely blues. interesting title huh. love minus one. what is infinity minus one? infinity. and what is love minus one? love. because love is boundless (infinity)... you get what i mean... well that's my hypothesis anyway, we're on the topic of numbers anyway. haha. and after teaching the pH scale and log... haha. but it's fun, they're all adding me to msn, my students. and it reminds me of what "chatting" was like when i was 13! it doesn't matter, triviality. but whatever he would have intended, really, most of what he writes is really good poetry and has been thought through, and when he takes up the guitar and harmonica it's really very lovely how someone who defies the stereotypes of nice voice / good looking and all just brings music into the world.

If anyone's interested look at the lyrics of "Desolation Row", or better still listen to it, it's from Highway 61 revisted I think.