Punching Marginal Holes in Poetry Robert Bator Parents who anxiously consulted Dr. Spock to know precisely when their toddler would build a tower of blocks can be similarly relieved to learn that their first grader knows consonant digraphs. As each of 260 such criterion reference skills are mastered through eighth grade by a student, Chicago Public School teachers punch holes in the margins of reading mastery cards. But some skills, like interpreting time lines, are more easily ticked off than interpreting Tennyson. So Laura, a bright eighth grader, found. She had long since "mastered" subordinate elements of poetry (rhyme scheme, simile etc.) via multiple choice or true-false tests. For example she had been asked to identify alliteration in this short poem: I Am a soft, sad, silhouette—sitting still,surrounded by silver moonshineand sand-shadowed splashing sounds—singing silent searching,tossing stones to the crashing surf. Since all but three words of the poem written by a local high school student (as an exercise in a creative writing class?) do alliterate, and there are only two sound patterns to locate, the test was overcoached. No wonder teachers complain that a student could "master" the skills in such coached quizzes and still not [End Page 48] know how to apply the skills in a more open setting. For example, the test of skill 'NC20: Understanding Symbolism" was also based on a short poem, "Flower in the Crannied Wall." Asked to explain the meaning of the flower, Laura wrote that it stood for beauty. Wrong, she was told. Try again. Enduring the same test repeatedly, Laura eventually recanted and confessed that the flower stood for "God and man," which she plucked from the poem's last line: "I should know what God and man is." Her ticket punched, Laura moved on to high school, but she had better graduate soon because the public high schools are plotting similar "continuous progress" checkoffs. A recent issue of Chicago Lawyer warns of an "Art Judgments" quiz. Students are asked to pick which of four opinions about Picasso's Guernica is correct. One of the two acceptable answers is: "The color suits the mood." Judged a wrong answer is: "I don't like it." In Chicago, anyway, students should beware of honesty. Often the choices are so obvious, judgment hardly enters in. When a teacher warrants that a child "distinguishes between realism and fantasy," it means simply that, given "City Streets and Country Roads" by Eleanor Farjeon and Eugene Field's "The Sugar-Plum Tree," the student could guess which has a "real world" setting. The titles alone would spare the student the task of reading, much less analyzing, the poems. From recognizing onomatopoeia to understanding a poem, as any teacher of literature will attest, there is quite a leap. Any real attempt to measure the child's responses to literature must attempt that leap. Otherwise, there are real grounds for the fear that written tests may supplant the ultimate of objectives—the enjoyment of literature. As Doris Young warns in A Critical Approach to Children's Literature (p. 101), "There is concern that procedures designed for research might become the major teaching strategy."1 The sum of oversimplified tests will never equal the whole of poetry. To refuse to risk a range of valid answers, to value equally the student's ability "to alphabetize to the second letter" with "writes own poetry," each as l/260th of a reading process, is absurd. Ticketing a child's path through isolated poetic elements should not supplant an extensive guided tour of the entire realm of poetry. Robert Bator Olice-Harvey College, Chicago Note 1. Sarah Innis Fenwick, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Copyright © 1982 Children's Literature Association