On, on, on cried the leaders at the back

[venta]

Can someone with a better knowledge of English literature[*] help me out here ?

I've been doing the BBC magazine's mini quizzes of multiple-guess GCSE questions. I did better than expected at my GCSE PE quiz, and got extremely cross with one of the questions in the GCSE maths quiz which I consdered to be impossible to answer.

Today it's English literature. I did pretty badly on it, mostly because I don't significantly remember Jane Eyre, haven't read To Kill A Mockingbird and apparently have inadvertently expunged all knowledge of Shakespeare from my brain. However, I take issue with this question:

In his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, writes: "Volleyed and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell." Why does he use such violent verbs?

The answers you're offered are:

1. To reinforce the danger faced by soldiers.
2. To reinforce the anger of the soldiers.
3. To reinforce the noise of battle.

I've read, but not studied, The Charge of the Light Brigade. I reckoned on 3 being the most plausible answer.

Says the BBC:

WRONG! He uses the verbs to reinforce the danger faced by the soldiers.

I can understand how you could argue for that, but I also think you could make a reasonable case for my answer (and probably even the remaining other answer). Either way, I simply don't understand how you can make a question like that have an such an absolute answer. Unless, of course, dear Alfred left copious notes indicating exactly what had been behind his choice of verbs.

Am I missing something ? Is there a good reason why answer 1 is the only correct answer ? Or is it just further evidence that multiple-guess questions are a ridiculous testing mechanism for some subjects ?

[*] I mean "the subject of Eng. lit. as taught in schools", rather than just "the body of literature in the English language". That these are so distinct may be telling.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I just clicked over to the quiz without looking at the rest of your post, and did exactly the same as you. Tennyson is my favourite poet, for the record.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. D'you know, I don't think I've got a favourite poet. This surprises me.

Other than obviousness like the Light Brigade, the Lady of Shallot and that droopy woman in her moated grange and I'm not really very well up on my Tennyson. If you're care to suggest a couple of less hackneyed poems for my education, that'd be lovely.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on that; he very specifically uses noise-related language, comparing the pounding of the artillary to a storm. So yes, it's dangerous, but it's _also_ noisy. And I seem to remember he was quite into sensory imagery and near-onomatapoiea (which I can't spell), although I can't think what I've read of his that has left me with that impression.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Any word which has more than three vowels on the trot loses the right to be spelled correctly.

[marjory.livejournal.com]

I just did that test too and thought the same as you. I would have argued that storm'd and thunder'd were verbs of sound. I guess that 'danger' is just more of a general answer... or the BBC like telling us we're thick! ;-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Mutliple choice questions are a stupid way to test interpretation of English literature.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, I do agree. They're OK for the "have you actually read the text at all" questions, but as j4 says below being told that your interpretation is WRONG! is not helpful.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I would argue for either 1 or 3 (but not 2). However, I think the point they're aiming at is that this verse is dealing with danger, and the next lines emphasise the danger and bravery:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

(The first half reappears later in the poem in less cheerful mode but is still not really about noise.)

Which just goes to show that you cannot isolate questions like this and expect them to be sensibly and 'correctly' answered by people not presently studying for GCSE Literature i.e. the whole sodding exercise is pretty worthless. Writing about isolated lines is always dangerous (and this thought comes from someone who bluffed an entire university exam essay about Frankenstein from one isolated passage where context was really quite necessary for a good attempt!).

Thought 2: the whole poem (thinking about the metre, particularly) evokes the noise of battle, so it's a bit redundant to emphasise it with these lines (but I'm not denying that you can argue that it still does and I would not say it was wrong to do so!)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose they're expecting you to be familiar with the entire poem and thus able to answer the question with correct context. Perhaps the original paper made more sense depending on the questions which came before and after the one cited. I'd be interested to know whether the paper had the text of the poem on it, too.

Not relevantly, for GCSE we had to study one section of an anthology. With the deliberate exception of some fairly gutgrinding Auden, I learned by heart all the poems as part of my revision - I like poetry and find learning it reasonably easy. Of course, most of it's now fallen out of my head. Those that stick tend to be of the friendly metronome school; Betjeman and so on.

[j4.livejournal.com]

There isn't a 'right' answer; there's the text, and interpretation(s) of the text. FWIW I think you'd have a hard time defending the 'anger' one, but that "WRONG!" from the BBC is exactly the sort of attitude that puts people off Eng. Lit. at school.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I couldn't agree more with this.

It was years after having had to do O-level Eng Lit before I actually voluntarily started thinking about interpreting the books I was reading.

[venta.livejournal.com]

If you're not familiar with it, I'd heartily recommend the poem Dear Mr Lee (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/488.html) by U A Fanthorpe.

Apparently Fanthorpe wrote it after she realised that she was teaching Eng. Lit. in a way that prevented pupils from actually liking the books they were reading.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It definitely put me off - this idea that you could decide what one goal the writer was trying to achieve, when they were dead and what they said was the poem and not the critical analysis, so how could this random teacher be able to read the mind of a dead bloke under a stone in Westminster Abbey and decide you'd got the wrong answer? I thought for years that couldn't be the point of Eng. Lit. because it was such a stupid thing to do. The biggest example was when we were studying Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, and I said what if Eddie was gay? which was dismissed completely as entirely wrong and irrelevant to the exercise, but as far as I can tell from everything I've heard or seen about it as an adult, was the point of the whole play.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

Ha! "It's a bloody stupid question" could surely describe 90% of lit crit questions. :p

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

Answer 1 is the correct answer, because according to the particular prejudices of whichever literature professor the Beeb got to write/mark the quiz, backed up by whichever high-falutin' but essentially bogus lit crit theory is currently in vogue, Answer 1 is the correct answer.

Unfortunately, the idea that there can be multiple correct answers to a lit crit question... is not currently one of the high-falutin' but essentially bogus lit crit theories that is in vogue. Maybe back in the 60s & 70s.

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

I did the quiz and got caught out like you. I think my old English teacher would spit blood if English answers were made so cut and dry like that. In my day we were taught that you can claim whatever you like about a text, as long as you can find the quotes in there to back you up.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

One more for 'that's a bollocks question'. It's both to emphasise the danger and to give an impression of the noise of battle.

Last I checked, though, English Literature wasn't examined in that way - it was still essay and short answer questions rather than multiple choice.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah. That's a relief. I had thought that the BBC page said that these were actual, genuine, real, live GCSE questions but I can't actually find that assertion so maybe it wasn't true for this quiz.

From temping in an exams department last year I was staggered at the number of subjects which are examined via multiple-guess so had thought it possible even for Eng. lit.

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

The quiz is essentially broken. English Lit is about analysis. You can say it's because they were joined by Thor if you like, as long as you can back it up with a reasoned argument. Just saying "the answer is 1" teaches you nothing except what to say the next time that person asks you that question. Unless they feel differently on that day, or change their mind.

This reminds me of a Guardian maths quiz I saw recently, which asked what the highest known prime number is. There's no maths in knowing that answer, it's trivia.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I gave the same answer as you to that question.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

...having gone back and looked at the quiz, I have issues with one of the maths questions. Largely because no matter how much I look at it, it seems to me that you could muck around with changing the angle in the middle all you liked without changing the angles at the top or bottom one whit, so how on earth can you express the one in terms of the other?

It may be, of course, that I'm missing an obvious constraint on the angles involved...

[venta.livejournal.com]

That's kind of the problem... the reason you can solve that problem is becase the angle in the middle is in the middle, ie it's subtended at the centre of the circle. As soon as you move those two lines around, they will no longer meet at the centre.

If the question told you that the angles x and y are at the centre, then the problem is soluble and you're done. But it doesn't; and that's the kind of thing that you really shouldn't assume just because the diagram looks like it's in the middle.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

My answer would have been, 'Because it's a *war*.'

Stupid question.

[moomin-puffin.livejournal.com]

Grounds for answer, English A-level and English Lit degree;

As you say, unless he left explanations the poem is open to interpretation to a certain extent.

If just that line was to be taken in isolation then any of the three could be valid really.
In the context of the whole poem I would consider 2 to be less valid as it makes less sense than the other two. Either 1 or 3 make perfect sense. I would argue for it being a combination of the two. Tennyson being a talented poet and all, I am sure he could put across more than one meaning with a line in a poem.

I am quite shocked at the BBC.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Which Maths question was impossible to answer?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The quiz is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8081043.stm

The impossible question is number 4.

More precisely, it's impossible to solve, unless you assume it's soluble, and that the missing information is therefore assumable.

Actually, even that may be incorrect. It's impossible to work out the definitively correct answer. It may be possible to eliminate two of the three answers as utterly impossible, leaving the third answer as being the only viable one of the the three. That still doesn't mean it must be right. Just that it's the only one which could be.

[(Anonymous)]

Was almost panicking at thought of Eng Lit as multiple choice victim until I got to comments on it still being proper questions and essays. Having opinions, if you could back them up, was OK at GCE 50 years ago but, at A level (paper three, general questions to be answered from your own reading) I got marked down in a homework essay because Kipling and Betjeman "would not be acceptable to the examiners" even if they illustrated the point to perfection.

[ebee.livejournal.com]

I did badly on this one too- but, as One Who Knows Of Exam Things...the test are rubbish and in no way reflect exam cotent. I checked. Grumpily.