What do you know?

For quite a number of years, I used a little text with my tests and measurements class that I wrote myself.  I had a number of issues and topics that I felt were helpful for a teacher to know or use when facing the testing and grading of students.  They were unknown in the well-known texts so I wrote my own.  Thus, it turned out that I would be guiding thinking about testing students on their knowledge of a book while we were all using a book I had written.

Teachers are often interested in diagnosing how well content from a book, a movie or a lecture has been grasped and retained by their students.  Deciding what are the important concepts to be remembered and devising ways to test for such retention is a major part of student evaluation.  But right while we were discussing the business of deciding what to test and how to test it, I could refer to my own knowledge of the text we were using, the one I wrote myself.  Could I finish the sentence begun on the page we were using?  Maybe.  Sometimes.  

Well, testing for the exact wording is just what the cloze procedure usually does.  Ok, forget that procedure.  Do I, the author, know the general idea of what the chapter says?  Yes, but not in that other chapter.  You see, I have decided since I wrote that material that I am better off taking a different stance.  I have changed my mind.  As W.E. Deming said, aren't I allowed to learn too?

A little more of such examination, discussion and rumination and my mental grasp of the chapter, the whole book, begins to look a bit like extra-holey Swiss cheese.  And that is just what my grasp, and if truth be told, your grasp and anybody's grasp of a book, or a movie or even what happened yesterday looks like.

Last night, I finished "Supreme Courtship" by Christopher Buckley.  I thought I would enjoy it and I did.  Funny!  Cleverly written!  Just as with his other books, "No Way to Treat a First Lady" and "Thank You for Smoking" So what are they about?  In a nut shell, but MY nutshell, they are about respectively,

• quite surprising political events on the national level in Washington,D.C. and
• a trial of the First Lady for murdering the President and
• the gun, tobacco and alcoholic beverage lobbyists in D.C.

All are quite funny if you like word play and outlandish thinking.

I could tell you a little more about the stories but my memory of them is a little Swiss-cheesy.