[Onomatopoeia] Quizzes
Pop quizzes and a different sort of unexpected assessment.
Originally published on February 21, 2015. Edited in October of 2017 and again in November of 2018.
The origin of the term is also its purpose: A pop quiz asks what you actually remember, not what you’ve crammed into your capacious short-term memories in the moments before the bell sounds. A pop quiz reveals what you’ve internalized.
Except when it doesn’t. In my experience, pop quizzes don’t work. They operate on fear and anxiety, two of the most deleterious feelings when it comes to knowledge and skill. They require endless obfuscation and subterfuge on the part of the teacher, too — a kind of arms race between student gamesmanship and real learning.
So… what can we do to make sure you know what you need to know? In this course, for instance, you unequivocally need to internalize the basics, which we’ll invoke through Dürer’s rhinoceros, as always.
I’m going to ask you questions about these basics — literary devices, rhetorical strategies, the language of grade abatement, and so on. But I don’t plan on collecting your answers to check for understanding, not even if your lack of investment makes me miss that (old, clumsy) approach.
Instead, the onus falls on you, because you will know, in the moment the question is asked, whether you know what you’re supposed to know. Only by lying to yourself, to me, and to your peers could you pretend in those moments that you have the requisite knowledge or understanding. And if you are willing to lie to that extent in a course like this…
The point of that last non-caption sentence, aposiopesis aside, is to bring up the real reason you need to internalize what we do:
Of the ten skills listed in that article as essential for the future, these are the ones emphasized by our instructional and assessment model:
- Writing Skills
- Verbal Communication Skills
- Self-Confidence and Assertiveness
- Time Management
- Networking Skills
- Basic Technology Skills
- Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
- Negotiation Skills
- The Ability to Work Well on a Team
- Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
Right. That’s all of them. What we do in this class is preparing you specifically and explicitly for the rest of your life.
Which means that a quiz, in here, is about developing you, as a collective, into human capital. It’s about herd immunity. You are responsible for each other, and the more collaborative your efforts are, the stronger you’ll become. You’ll stamp out illusory superiority and frustration. You’ll lift up the people who work hard but struggle to internalize information.
Try to let go of the idea that the percentage of questions you get correct is what counts. It’s much more holistic than that. It matters if you frequently don’t know what you should, if you consistently don’t learn the material, or if you can’t remember the information no matter how hard you try. But it matters more if you help others fill in the gaps in their understanding. It matters more if you grow.
So what’s left? Well, after you’ve adjusted to what a quiz does for us, we need a name for them. If we’re abandoning “pop,” maybe another onomatopoeia will work.
We’ve covered pop art and comic strips, which means you might as well consider comic books, where sounds are a strange part of the narrative. I’m fond of BAMF, the apparent sound of teleportation, and SNIKT, probably the most famous comic book sound effect. There’s Spider-man’s THWIP, too.
Of course, BAMF is used to mean other, less helpful things (at least in a classroom), which is why the embedded thumbnail for the interstitial discussion in 2015 does not match the updated post itself:
Instead, we ended up that year with doki doki, the onomatopoeia for heartbeats in Japan. Doki Doki Quizzes, or DDQ, will be what we call them until students suggest something better. It needs to be an onomatopoeia that works on multiple levels, and it helps if it’s unique. As always, the Internet has you covered if you need a place to start.
