I often wonder why people think reading a poem is different than reading other works of fiction. When you pick up Tinkers by Paul Harding or Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk or A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, you just start reading. You do not aim to discover the meaning of the work until you have worked through the story.

But with a poem people start trying to figure the meaning from the minute they read the title. If you are trying to determine the meaning of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” from the moment you begin reading it, you will miss the horror of picturing a raven flying into your house and speaking to you. If you are trying to discover the meaning of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” you will miss the woods, lovely, dark, and deep.

My friend lent me Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins.

I sat in a Dunkin’ Donuts reading through it and I nearly spat out my coffee in surprise. (I am sure she’s glad that I didn’t: she lent me an autographed copy.) One of his poems echoes what I wrote in Diving into Poetry two weeks ago.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide.

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside a poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

–Billy Collins

A poem, like any work of writing, is an attempt to share an experience. Some poems, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost, share complex experiences and draw on outside sources of theology and philosophy. And some poems are straightforward, sensate experiences.

Water-ski across their surfaces before wondering if there is life beneath the surface.

“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
– John Keats in the film Bright Star

Bright Star has become one of my favorite movies since I saw it twice in theatres. And my favorite scene from the film is the poetry lesson that John Keats gives Fanny Brawne. Fanny states she does not know how to work out a poem, as so many of us would say if someone asked us how to work out a poem. Keats responds with the above.

The last few nights I have watched again and again and again this particular scene. Keats gives an entire year’s worth of poetic instruction in that single scene.

* * *

Lately in discussing poetry with my friends, they say, “I am no expert in poetry,” or “I do not understand poetry,” even before we have discussed a poem. If I were to ask a friend what they thought of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club or Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream, would they say, “Oh, I am no expert in novels”?

No, they would not. The very idea is ridiculous.

Understanding a Poem

So, how does one understand a poem “through the senses”?

A poem requires that we flex our imagination at least as much as a novel does. Perhaps a poem requires more than does a novel. Where a novel so often allows the writer time to explain, the intensity of a poem does not afford the poet the same luxury.

But just because a poem is intense does not mean we need to ignore the narrative of the poem. When one begins immediately to seek out the meaning of a poem, it is as if one is swimming immediately to the shore hoping to understand the lake by measuring its shore.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

In my reading of poetry, I find that the poem says what it means. Now, there are peaks of meaning. There are heights to scale. If you see a mountain from afar, would you allow someone to say that you have not seen the mountain? Nonsense, you have seen the mountain. You know something of the mountain.

And so it is with a poem. If you read a poem, if you understand it at its first level — its most obvious — you still have understood the poem. Just as a mountaineer will understand a mountain in a different fashion than does the recreational skier, so will a professor of poetry understand a poem in a different fashion than does the casual reader.

But does that mean the skier — the casual reader — does not know the poem?

Let me put this all another way. Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t get song lyrics”? Not just saying they failed to understand a particular song, but they failed to understand “song lyrics” as an entire category of expression?

I never have. And I find the the very idea a little silly.

And yet, people will dismiss poetry before they have spent time with it. They will say they do not understand it to save themselves from having to read it. So, let’s dive into one poem today.

Sound and Sense

In his long poem on poetry and criticism, Alexander Pope wrote, “The sound must echo the sense.” What does that mean?

A poem must be internally consistent, yes. Its tenor of voice must mirror the emotion that it expresses. I imagine a woman shouting, “I am calm!” This is an example of the sound not echoing the sense.

A. E. Housman gives us an excellent poem that says what it means while having some depth to explore.

Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

– A.E. Housman

Find the Sense

First, does the sound match the sense? Did the poet choose words and images that conveyed a consistent tone of expression throughout?

Though Housman uses some inversions in grammar, I think he makes his meaning quite clear. The first stanza is a straightforward description of a cherry tree in bloom. Housman’s speaker thinks the cherry tree in blossom the loveliest of trees.

The second stanza is a bit more allusive — it refers to something outside of the poem that explains why Housman assumed he only had “threescore years and ten” — and he piles the various references to years atop one another.

First, he states how long he expects his life to be, seventy years. Then he states that he’s already lived twenty years and thinks, “It only leaves me fifty more.”

Here, to climb to the next peak of the mountain, question why Housman writes, “only” in that sentence. When you think of the next fifty years, does the word “only” come to mind? If so, in what way? Is it the same as how Housman means it here? Can you understand what “only” means from only this stanza or need you see how the meaning of “only” is changed in the final stanza?

And the final stanza further reveals the speaker’s temperament. Rather than despair, the speaker expresses hope. Rather than finding only the spring beautiful, knowing there is a limit to the number of springs he will see, he seeks beauty out in other seasons. When he writes he will see the cherry tree hung with snow, does he mean actual snow? Is he comparing the whiteness of cherry blossoms to the whiteness of snow?

The meaning of Housman’s poem is there. Were you able to dive in?

Medicine, law, business, engineering are necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love are what we stay alive for.

–John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society

She said, “I didn’t take any literature courses in college. The only courses I took were in technical writing for the sciences. They were in the English Department, even though writing for the sciences isn’t literature.”

I grew sad thinking that scientific writing is no longer literature.

One of the first essays I published on Literature&Literacy was about this very topic. There was a time when the word “literature” was used to encompass all of the written word and the word “poetry” was used to encompass both prose fiction and verse. At that time, being literate included having a knowledge of the scientific writing of the day.

But I cannot fault what she said. I do not read Scientific American nor Nature. I do not read Popular Mechanic nor MAKE Magazine.

And that also makes me sad.

While I am not wholly ignorant of contemporary science, I am nearly so. I chalk this up to the sciences becoming increasingly specialized. Little seems to be written for the popular audience, though want of finding might be from want of looking.

I remember sitting with friends in college for dinner. They were all scientists of some sort — physicists, biologists, astronomers — and they each knew enough about the others’ work to understand the conversation. I believe they were talking about string theory. But what they were talking about was so beyond the physics I had studied in high school that I just felt stupid.

And perhaps that feeling of ineptitude, of stupidity, of a dumbness kept me from studying the sciences.

The sciences that interested me most were the brain sciences. Although I finished with degrees in the humanities and the history of art, I chose schools based on whether they offered undergraduate degrees on neuroscience. And I do occasionally read some on neuroscience. Some of the most useful ideas I’ve encountered about our minds and how they function came from reading Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. And Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time left me with a sense of wonder.

My interest has always lain in how to live in this life, how others live in this life. Technology interests me only so far as it is part of my life and people engage it. In some ways, I dislike technology because it removes a human element from our life; yet, I do not want to see people’s bodies ache from back breaking labor like in Millet’s The Sower.

Science does not answer these questions.

For that reason both the sciences and the arts are necessary. They have different domains and do not work to answer the same questions.

His voice fell at the end of each sentence. At first he had placed the microphone on his shirt pocket, which only picked up the occasional bit of phrase or word. Sitting in the front, I could hear him without the aid of the microphone.

Yet Alex Green, owner of Back Pages Books, kept me rapt as he talked about Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When we think of thinkers and poets, we think of them at the end of their lives when we are able to see their work as a whole. We look at Emerson as the Concord intellectual, perhaps as the surly man who wrote disparagingly of how others misconstrued his work. We read “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” and see them as works of little moment.

Mr. Green took a different tack. He spoke about the first two sermons that Emerson delivered after his ordination, as a young man of twenty-three, the man with a family history of great ministers. “This is where it all started,” Mr. Green said. “You can see the seeds of his later works in these sermons. No, these works are uneven, he was still a young man and not in full control of his powers. But you can see so much in these two sermons.”

When we think of industrialization, of the Industrial Revolution, we often think of Lowell, Massachusetts. Mr. Green argued that we should look at Waltham, Massachusetts, first. “Studying the Industrial Revolution starting in Lowell is like studying the Civil War starting with the first battle that the Union Army won.” Rather than building a mill town from the ground as they did in Lowell, the first mills were built in Waltham, a farming community that some of the wealthy Bostonians used as their summer home.

And, when thinking of these sermons, it is important to remember that these wealthy citizens would have gone back to Boston in the fall. Emerson gave a bright burning speech. My memory cannot do it justice. But I shivered as I listened to Mr. Green read Emerson’s words.

During the question and answer period, I asked about the influences of Eastern thought and mysticism on Emerson, if he could see them in these early sermons. He said that he thought he sensed something there. In Emerson’s notebooks and journals, Mr. Green said, there are references to Byron and Shelley. “Although their works were caricatures or cartoons of Eastern thought, I think some of what filters down to Emerson comes straight from the English Romantic poets, particularly Byron.” The Romantics were fascinated with the East and some of the first translations of Eastern literature was becoming available.

Talking with him after his lecture, Mr. Green admitted he didn’t know as much about the roots of Emerson’s interest in Eastern thought. I reminded him of the reference in Walden about Thoreau sitting in contemplation, what we would now call meditation. We both wondered when, specifically, they began studying, what they read, and what they knew.

I think Mr. Green has found the topic of his next lecture on Emerson.

And when he presents, I will be there.

You May Also Like

• Back Pages Books, Mr. Green’s independent, local bookstore in Waltham
• “Here’s to the Self-Published Writer” by Alex Green, “Waltham Words”, boston.com, April 15, 2009
• How the Writing is Smarter than the Writer

“When I become a teacher, my students are going to look at my syllabus and say, ‘You expect us to do what now?’” my friend D. said. “I believe in the multiple-intelligences theory.”

We talk about the freedom that the Digital Age has given us for self-expression.

But has it really? The Internet is, largely, a text-based medium. Yes, we do have websites that are visual galleries but, for example, the website of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and even the galleries themselves — are filled with text.

Writing is becoming an ever more important skill. Kara Miller wrote an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, “Failure to communicate“, in which she discusses how weak are the writing skills of incoming college students.

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

–Kara Miller

I have thought about this problem myself as I pursue becoming a teacher. Robyn Jackson in her book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching suggested if students are weak on developing opening paragraphs for essays, give them assignments just on opening paragraphs; if they are weak on topic sentences, give them assignments on topic sentences; if they are weak on the structure of an entire essay, give them assignments to write entire essays. I think of the hundreds of students I will have and how long it will take just those shorter assignments.

I admire D. She’s very passionate about challenging her future students and encouraging them to think for themselves. I admire that she wants to use a portfolio system — requiring tests, essays, presentations, and class participation — rather relying solely on one channel. In fact, that is the kind of assessment system that I want to use. But I wonder how much of our time employing that is going to require.

I have thought about giving students two grades per paper. The first for their grammar and the second for their arguments. Reading Kara Miller’s op-ed article, I wonder if I can really separate the two. If the student does not clearly spell out what he or she meant to say, then the teacher is just guessing at the meaning.

D., by her own admission, did not get the best grades in high school. She was not interested in the history she was taught and only rarely in the books. Her interests were more attuned to what she’s now studying, philosophy and psychology. She did not feel engaged with the work and as such did not care about the assessments she was given.

“Middle and high schools do not teach critical thinking,” she asserts.

I remember feeling that way as well. Disagreeing with the teacher in an essay was often a recipe for a bad grade, even in honors and advanced placement classes. And this was before the institution of high stakes testing in Massachussetts.

How can the MCAS assess critical thinking?

It cannot, and we should not expect it to measure that. The MCAS presents the items as if everything can be categorized as right or wrong. We can agree that Shakespeare wrote sonnets and plays, that his works were written in iambic pentameter, often rhyming; we can agree that Thomas Hardy wrote novels and poetry, perhaps we can even agree that it was the poor reviews of critics of his poetry that pushed him to writing novels; and we can call facts forms in which authors wrote, works that are attributed to them.

But on the meaning of the work, on the interpretation of the works, there is plenty of room for disagreement. You may think this passage was parody, was an ironic comment on something; I may think the author meant it as stated. The author cannot tell us and, in truth, I wouldn’t want him or her to clarify.

Ambiguity is good for thought.

You May Also Like

• Testing, Assessment, and Feedback
• Children Left Behind: Statistics and Abstractions
• Knowing and Understanding

In This Essay

So Much Things to Say: 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival edited by Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer.

My friend, Simon Brown, has a poem included in the anthology, So Much Things to Say!

I’ve mentioned Simon before, in one of my first essays The Prestige in Poetry. I called him “a poet of great promise” and I am glad to see his work starting to get the recognition that I expect from him.

This is the start of great things for Simon and his work.

Check out Simon’s blog, The Written Word. And read an article about the Calabash International Literary Festival on The Jamaica Gleaner.

We sat in the small square of chairs set before a microphone and two tables, one with two books on little stands and the other piled with books. Three women walked from the escalator over to the table and one of them, our poet, sat down at the table between the two books.

The time was not yet 3:30pm, the appointed time.

I chatted with my girlfriend. She asked me what I knew of Louise Glück’s work. I admitted I knew little besides her The First Four Books of Poems, which sat on my lap waiting to be signed.

I had bought the book largely for the silver sticker that read, “U.S. Poet Laureate.” While I lived in Chicago, I wanted to get acquainted with contemporary English-language poetry and would regularly peruse the book shelves there. When I saw that sticker, I figured there were worse poets with whom to get acquainted. A few times I thumbed through her work but it did not much resonate with me.

“What will you be reading today?” a member of the small audience asked.

Louise looked startled. “Reading? Why did you think this was a reading? I am not reading today. If you’ve got a questions, I’d be happy to have a conversation with you all. And, of course, I’ll sign.”

On the little table, just beside her with her books, a sign said, “Reading & Signing.” There was a collective sigh of disappointment.

She looked at our blank faces. “Please understand, that I hate to read my work. I think the performance cheapens my poetry. My poems, when spoken, get transformed into a linear progression of words that only happens once. I apologize if there was a misunderstanding, but I clearly told Barnes&Noble that this was to be a signing event.”

When Homer, and the singing minstrels who sang his epics, gave voice to his poetry, did that cheapen the work? When Shakespeare’s actors gave voice to the grand poetry in his plays, did that cheapen the work? I thought these questions but did not dare give them voice.

She added, “I only read if my publisher demands it. Or if there is a huge financial incentive.”

No, Ms. Glück. It is not the performance of your work that cheapens it: it is your attitude.

In This Essay

The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks: Why Agatha Christie’s method was utterly deranged by Christine Kenneally, Slate, April 12, 2010.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Letters on Life: New Prose Translations by Rainer Maria Rilke (Ulrich Baer, ed. and trans.)

On Monday, I was reading Slate. What inspired me to read it that day, I am not sure: it has not been one of the sources that I regularly turn to for my news.

Perhaps because I want to be a writer myself, I have always found it fascinating to listen to stories about how artists, musicians, and authors create their work. Without any real study, the descriptions of the creative process stick with me.

For example, years ago I listened to part of an interview with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. (Perhaps the entire band was being interviewed, my memory is vague.) I remember nothing about that interview, save this one thing: R.E.M. records the music without Michael Stipe present and then they give him the rough cut on a tape. He walks around listening to the tape again and again until he is able to put words to the music.

But I am glad that I decided to read Slate this week. Otherwise I would have missed a great article about the writing process that Agatha Christie employed. If you can call how Agatha Christie wrote a “process.”

A Little Here, A Little There, Maybe a Little Lost

John Curran studied 73 of Agatha Christie’s notebooks and published a book on them that after reading the article in Slate I desperately want to read, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.

Christie did not work sequentially through one notebook. According to Christine Kenneally’s article, Curran was able to trace three notebooks that Christie used for “at least 17 years and 17 novels.” She would write her thoughts in whatever notebook was nearest at hand when she needed to write, as long as it had empty pages to fill.

And Christie did not separate her writing life from her personal life in the notebooks. Grocery lists and bridge scores adorn the pages. Her husband’s calculations and notes are there too, as well as her daughter’s penmanship exercises.

Though not a method I would like to employ, Christie’s method has me captivated. Did the search for bits and pieces of story through multiple notebooks remind her of devices she’d used previously? Remind her of ideas she had had long ago and discarded only to realize how they could be employed now?

Two Pens

I envy Curran the opportunity to study one his beloved author’s notebooks. What wouldn’t I give up if someone gave me the opportunity to study Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters and notebooks? How could I even begin to ascribe a value to seeing his writing process, watching his chipping the raw stone of an idea down until it becomes a fully sculpted poem?

But I will need to learn German first, if that dream has any chance of becoming a reality. (It’s on my to do list after mastering Italian.)

Although I do not much care for the book Letters on Life, I am grateful for having read the introduction. In the introduction, Baer describes the poet sitting at his desk and staring at two pens: one dedicated to his Muse, exclusively for use in crafting of poetry; the other dedicated to life, used for correspondence and grocery lists.

This is all I know of the poet’s method. And it may be a fiction.

I wonder if I had looked further in Letters on Life what I might have found on Rilke’s method. The book lifts excerpts from Rilke’s massive correspondence and arranges them, without context or addressee, into sections. Perhaps there was a section on craft that I missed by trying to read the book sequentially, rather than using it as Baer had intended.

The Terror of the Blank Page

Although I know little about the process of Rilke but much of his work, those elements of knowledge are reversed when it comes to Stephen King.

Since college some of my friends who write have been recommending that I read On Writing but I have resisted. A snobbish sentiment long prevented me from reading it. Although he is a New York Times Bestselling Author, I think of Stephen King’s work as pulp writing. I admit this is a prejudiced opinion: I can claim to vividly remember reading only one story by King, about a laundry press that develops a taste for human blood, and may have read a few other stories from that collection.

I am glad to have had the good sense to challenge my prejudice at least in regards to On Writing. And I think that I may further challenge it by borrowing my girlfriend’s copy of Hearts in Atlantis.

Stephen King sits down every day and writes. He carries a book with him wherever he goes because he is as passionate about reading as he is about writing. Although I don’t know if he writes long hand or on a computer or how he organizes his drafts, I doubt his method resembles the one employed by Agatha Christie. After he finishes a draft, he puts in a drawer for months — a technique that even Horace advises — until he has half forgotten the story.

The advice that I’ve read in On Writing is the same that I’ve read in The Lie That Tells a Truth by John Dufresne or The Writing Life by Annie Dillard or an article by Andre Dubus in The Writer Magazine from the 1960s which was reprinted recently or The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.

Glue your ass to a chair and write. Face the terror of the blank page and realize it is not so terrifying.

Whatever method you use — whether it resembles Agatha Christie’s or a more orderly method — nothing will happen unless you put pen to paper or fingers to keys.

Since dedicating myself to fulfilling my dream on April 2nd — 12 days ago now — I have written 8 of the last 12 days. From those eight hours of work, I have grown my novel from the seed of three handwritten pages to 55 handwritten pages.

And if I can keep this up, perhaps my oeuvre will rival Agatha Christie’s: 66 novels, 22 plays, over 140 short stories, and many poems.

Last night at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, I saw a joint reading of Andre Dubus III and one of his mentors, Thomas E. Kennedy. During the question and answer session following the reading, Andre answered questions about his forthcoming memoir.

One thing that he said really caught my attention and I have been thinking about it since he said it.

That’s the wonderful thing about writing. The writing is smarter than the writer. I set out to write an essay and then realized this would take a book to tackle. I learned more about myself and the history of my life. My only hope is that I write something useful that people can relate to. Besides my wife.
– Andre Dubus III, with the poetic license that is memory.

Not too long ago I stumbled across Everett Bogue’s blog Far Beyond the Stars and Colin Wright’s blog Exile Lifestyle. Both blogs are very, very good. Even before reading these two advocates of minimalism, I had thought that I would like to reduce my belongings to a trunk worth of clothes and a trunk worth of books. They make the goal seem even more worth pursuing.

Today, while the idea that the writing is smarter than the writer was rolling around in my head, I was reading Everett Bogue’s free ebook How to Create a Movement and Colin Wright’s free ebook How to be Remarkable.

Both ebooks talked about the importance of having passion.

So, I stopped to ask myself, “What is my writing telling me? Where is my passion?” I thought about Literature&Literacy, about the post that generated the most interesting discussion. What did I come back to again and again?

Poetry.

My real passion has always been poetry. I love to read novels and probably have read more novels than poems in my life time. But there is something in the poetry that strikes me, something I retain from poetry that I don’t as much with a novel.

Perhaps that’s not entirely fair. I remember my Senior Directed Readings in the Humanities at Ohio Wesleyan University. I studied the development of the sonnet from Petrarch to John Donne. One of the first things I read was Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry along side his sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella. When Sidney defends “poetry” he’s defending what we would now call literature, novels as well as poems.

I have read novels like Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels The Sand Child and The Sacred Night which were poems. And I have read and heard recited “poems” which were not even prose.

So, I am going to start following my bliss. I don’t know how that may change my writing. But Sir Philip Sidney might have an idea.

I.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
–Sir Philip Sidney from Astrophel and Stella

In This Essay

“Only Two States Win Race to Top” by Neil King, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2010

On the surprising science of motivation by Dan Pink, TED, August 2009

Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel M. Koretz, Ph.D.

I think the “Race to the Top” initiative by the Obama administration is as wrongheaded as “No Child Left Behind”.

Do not get me wrong, I believe that both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have the best interests of our children at heart. And, I believe that President Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy, who people forget co-sponsored the legislation in the Senate, had the best interest of our children at heart. But I think they all are gravely mistaken.

I have worked at banks for the past three years. I have a pay-for-performance incentive plan, based on how many checking accounts, savings accounts, home equity loans and lines of credit, and investment referrals I make.

And it does not motivate me.

The Science of Motivation

When I go into work, I want to help people who want my help. I want to provide them with a service that they need and want, that will benefit them without putting them at too much risk.

But that mindset is not rewarded by an incentive plan. The metrics of the incentive plan do not take into account the risk that people could default on their home equity loans; that they could make a mistake, bounce one check that leads to a spiral of overdrafts that they cannot repay, and damages their ability to get a bank account for years to come; or that the person was put into the best account for them.

Volume. All that the incentive plan measures is volume.

At first, when I didn’t feel motivated by the incentive plan, I thought there was something wrong with me. But I realized I saw clearly after reading about the science on motivation and watching Dan Pink’s TED Lecture.

Dan Pink’s lecture is so important that although I’ve mentioned it before, I have decided to embed it below. Please take 20 minutes to watch it.

Dan Pink on Motivation

Even business people, unless they are solving simple problems, are not motivated by incentives. Public education is much too complex a problem to be solved by paying teachers for their students performing well on one high-stakes test.

Race to the Test

People who say that teaching to a test is good education, as long as the test is valid, are wrong.

Before the flood, I was reading Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel M. Koretz, Professor of Education at Harvard University. Testing is Dr. Koretz’s area of expertise. He has studied the impact of teaching to the test. The results haven’t been good.

Although the scores have gone up, Dr. Koretz attributes much of this to score inflation rather than to increased learning.

When I was preparing for the SATs, I took an SAT Preparatory Course. And I am sure many of you reading this did too. Did the SAT Course teach you anything new? And, no, “test taking strategies” do not qualify as something new. If my score was higher because of the SAT Course, it was not because I knew more for taking it, but because I was gaming the test.

Taking the time in our classes to teach “test taking strategies” for the high stakes testing takes away from the time that we could actually be teaching our children content of value. If you teach above the level of the test, children will be able to take a test.

The way to properly use tests is as assessments. Students who are tested in April do not get their scores back until June or July. Their teachers get the scores no sooner. How can a teacher adjust his or her lesson plans and pedagogy for the takers of the test without the results of the test? Tests need to be targeted and timely.

We need to put the direction of our education system back into the hands of teachers and principals. I heard recently that there is not a single teacher on the Texas Board of Education, which is creating waves with its rewriting of its curriculum standards. Imagine if the American Medical Board had lawyers and teachers and politicians, but no doctors. Imagine if the American Bar Association had doctors and dentists, but no lawyers.

The free market model is not the proper answer for every question. Education is not a commodity and should not be subject to the free market forces.