Learnin'
Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 3:17AM And here’s what everybody’s been waiting for since I departed to take on the Great Stack: The Parade of Wonderful Student Statements.
I had to smuggle them out this year. We were told on Day Two to stop writing down these priceless drops of student wisdom which made us want to slay ourselves and others: “You may smile to yourself,” the question leader said generously, “but we want to make sure we respect the students.”
Sure I respect the students. What I want is for the students to respect the test. And most of them do; I’d say I scored over a thousand essays last week, and some were simply top-shelf tequila. I awarded my first-ever nine, the highest score we can possibly give—two nines, actually. The best of the essays discussed the author’s conscious choices throughout, acknowledging that books do not magically spring from the Earth, fully bound and ready to be SparkNoted. One used the word “belie.” Correctly, even.
But even though my own writing is far from perfect, I’m sorry, no eighteen-year-old native English speaker privileged with three years of Advanced Placement English Literature instruction should use the word “kinda” in a formal essay. Especially not one in the very act of attempting to demonstrate writing proficiency at the college level.
There are two kinds of suck in this world: Earnest suckage, which includes the people who truly are trying, but just can’t bust the proper move at the proper time, much like me in nearly every single aspect of life; and douchy suckage, which means you haven’t done something properly because you couldn’t be roused from behind your pink-cased iPod long enough to give two craps, much like me when confronted with a word problem, or folding something neatly. I’m going to close my eyes in slow empathy at the former and kickbox the latter, because you have utterly wasted the resources of your school, your teachers, and your scorer, who is now that much closer to utter nihilism, thanks to you. And I’ve laid a cynical eye on enough of these essays to know the difference. Some students turned in completely blank books. Some wrote little notes of hello, or penned earnest letters about a desire for Burger King. Others, bowing to the Face of peer pressure, wrote “THIS IS SPARTA” in cheeky crossed-out letters.
This year I drew the free response question, highly prized amongst the readers due to the variety inherent in the prompt. The students were asked to discuss how any literary foil revealed the main character’s traits and illuminated the meaning of the work. This meant that we were given a pass from last year’s endless JohnnyFest, but it in its place were approximately forty five million essays discussing The FREAKING Kite Runner, which is a lovely book, I’m sure, but is clearly AP Flavor O’ the World Lit Month, and by Day Five I was quite ready to tell Hassan where he could shove his stupid kite. Hassan was a chump, y’all.
Second nomination for GO AWAY BOOK, GO FAR FAR AWAY was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Tea Cake (or, as one student called him, Tea Cup) is hereby formally invited to bite me.
Such rage pervaded everyone in the free response question; the professor next to me, at the end of the week, very gently laid his head down on the table and said, “The Lord of the F*&^@%# Rings,” and two days before that I was walking around with a Post-It note stuck to my forehead featuring the word “Hamlet” surrounded by a strike-through symbol.
What have I learned? Well, for one thing, there are an awful lot of books out there I never ever want to read:
”The great American book Huckleberry Finn, written by Roger Clemens…”
“The author of the wonderful Roaring 20’s novel Great Gatsby is Nathanial Hawthorne.”
“In the book The Color Purple, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey…"
“John Steinbeck wrote a masterpiece when he did To Kill a Mockingbird.”
You may have noticed up there that many of the students tended to ladle their approval over their choices, as though in the act of showing up to the test wearing a Tshirt which read “I THINK EDGAR ALLAN POE WAS A DARN GOOD POET” we’d immediately equate recognition of the Western canon with good essay writing. You hear that, Sylvia Plath? Some future frat tool in Hoboken thinks you produced “a really deep work, destined to be a classic forever”! Wasn’t it all worth it?
Further edu-macate along with me:
“I forgot the name of Hamlet’s buddy, so this essay is going to be a little confusing.”
“Making decisions may be detrimental to one’s health.”
“Hamlet was a think-first kind of guy, and really angsty if you ask me.”
“Rochester was a man of statues and wealth.”
“Hamlet’s girlfriend, Othello….”
“The main character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a boy named Tom Sawyer.”
“Laertes challenges Hamlet to a fence.”
“This book contained pathos.”
“All these things serve to really piledrive the point to its visceral home, explicitly and without mercy.”
“It seemed everything was going his way until he got thrown in jail and died.”
“The relationship between Iago and Othello illuminates the meaning of the work because it reveals that if you are trusting someone who has not gotten the position they desired, they can definitely screw you in the end.”
And finally, please do take this with you when you go:
“Authors rarely, if ever, make mistakes.”
I’ll drink to that at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
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Reader Comments (23)
Wait, you DIDN'T like that piledriving one? I'm going to start trying to use that in everyday life.
MB,
I know the AP grading week is hard on you but I admit I was laughing so hard, I had tears by the time I got to the Whoopi and Oprah line. (My favorite, by the way, followed by a close second to Hamlet's gf Othello).
I just send a mass email to all my friends who read or are teachers or are both. I know they will enjoy this post and hopefully come back again. I love to brag about you and your annual AP stack quotes is one of my favorite things to look forward too.
KB
PS, They can never pay you enough for having to read through that.
ooops... I forgot to mention that I read The Kite Runner for book club. While it was a good read, I can't imagine having to write an essay or paper on it. I thought 6 discussion questions was deep enough. I also didn't think it really needed to be made into a movie.
I am curious now to read his second book and see if it is any good or if he was just able to publish again b/c of the success of the first book.
If you haven't read it, please don't let the kids essays deter you from giving it a read when you have time. It wasn't so good as to drop everything and stay up all night reading but it was good. A little heavy but good.
"this book contained pathos" . . . what would make that quote even better is if the writer was discussing The Three Musketeers.
I can NOT imagine for one second grading those essays. I would find the nearest tall building and jump. The landing would be less painful than all that awful writing!!! (This from a girl with a degree in English who used to be a writing tutor...)
Whatever they pay you, it isn't enough.
Ah, it takes me back to my days as a high school English teacher. I don't know what I'd have to be paid or promised to take on The Stack. Kudos to you for coming out alive and with your sense of humor still intact.
"IMO, Hamlet was Emo, and his uncle a major douchebag... oh, and his mom was a slut"
C'mon, doesn't that scream 'Harvard worthy'? :-)
BTW, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google" rel="nofollow">I just read an article that worried me, and made me think if the newer generations ill be able to read books like "War & Peace" anymore. You see, the Internet is re-wiring our brains so that anything longer than 1 page is already a struggle to comprehend.
Meh, the Kite Runner was alright. We read it for book club...then later, we read the 2nd book (who's name escapes me at the moment) My mother, who teaches AP English at a private catholic all girls high school, requested that Kite Runner be added to the curriculum. Perhaps it was one of her students who wrote on it!
The 2nd book was brutal, brutal, brutal. Not as good as Kite Runner and SO.VERY.SAD.
RPJ - I just read that whole article (in ONE sitting! ;) ). Excellent. Thank you so much for linking to it. I forwarded it to my book club and several other people. Very thought provoking.
Whenever someone needs some kind of info (giraffe transport??), I am the one they call on to find it on the internet. I wonder how my brain has changed in the 5 or 6 years that I have really begun to use the web for "everything"? Definitely an interesting thought...
I just got my reading list for AP Literature (I'm going to be a high school senior), and I am proud to say that I will not be reading Hamlet, The Color Purple, nor The Lord of the F#@$%&! Rings for my five-page comparative essay due the first day of class.
Yay Kurt Vonnegut! :P
Ohhhhh, Vonnegut... not much better, I'm afraid. He has his place, I guess, but IMHO is truly not deserving of all the worship blasted his way within the book larnin' community. He's kind of the Jon Stewart of the literary world. He has the proper politics for the industry, however, and of course that's 99% of the battle. Well, at least it's not "Beloved" again, SOME MORE. Beware, dear Sophie, and read some Tom Wolfe, Timothy O'Brian, Cheever, Ellison, Florence King, Emerson, Amy Tan, T.H. White, and especially some lesser-known Mark Twain nonfiction to balance him out. Catch-22 makes exactly the same point as Vonnegut does, but in a manner vastly more entertaining, complex, and, in general, talent-laden. In any event, please do not use the word "kinda" in your 5-page essay. But seeing as you used commas very properly in your comment, I have great faith in you. : )
RE: the article... I could have told the author the very same thing after five minutes with my Comp students, who, upon reading the syllabus, absolutely FREAKED OUT that they would be reading TWO WHOLE BOOKS that semester. Since most of my colleagues use those horrid "reader" textbooks with snippets of books instead of the whole shebang, they were therefore automatically having to "work more."
I'm partial to John Steinbeck's East of Eden myself...what with the eternal battle of good and evil.
I must admit to pulling some adolescent essay shenanigans in high school. We were convinced that our AP History teacher never read our essays, and so before each exam, a group of us would pick a random word, such as "penguin," and try and work it into our essay about, say, the Boston Tea Party.
The entire year, and the teacher never said anything, and we all continued to get A's and B's.
We were such dorks.
I hear you on the Kite Runner. I dropped that one like a hot potato about half way through and I don't do that very often. I was just offended by the notion that if someone rapes you, you must curl up in a little ball and act like a zombie for the rest of your life. Bad stuff happens, but most people manage to find a way to deal with it and move on with their lives.
As for the "This is Sparta" comment - huh??? I don't get it. Maybe I've just been out of college for too long.
"...and so before each exam, a group of us would pick a random word, such as “penguin,” and try and work it into our essay about, say, the Boston Tea Party."
Toni, you just made me remember this incredible dissertation made by Doug Zongker (PhD), about a paper he wrote AND was published by the peer-reviewed annals of the The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk" rel="nofollow">Enjoy! And PAY ATTENTION, you might learn a thing or two ;-)
"Authors rarely, if ever, make mistakes."
Whoops. That's news to me! Now I wonder what those bad things I've made are actually called...
...absolutely FREAKED OUT that they would be reading TWO WHOLE BOOKS that semester. Since most of my colleagues use those horrid “reader” textbooks with snippets of books instead of the whole shebang, they were therefore automatically having to “work more.” ...
At least you were not my elder daughter's high school lit teacher, who thought the Rankin-Bass production of "The Hobbit" an adequate substitute for reading the book, and also listed Danielle Steel as among her most admired authors in history (nothing against Danielle Steel, but she doesn't belong on a list with Jane Austen or Victor Hugo).
And the Chicken paper is beyond price.
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HAHAHAHA! My friend forwarded this to me and said that she really hoped none of my students' foibles were listed. One of my students who often reminded me of Jordan Baker (always looking like she was balancing something on her chin) and who had no qualms about telling others that their ideas were nonsense, forgot Laertes' name! She was probably your “I forgot the name of Hamlet’s buddy, so this essay is going to be a little confusing" girl! I think she said she called him Lawrence . . . Ay ay ay . . .
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Well, at least it’s not “Beloved” again, SOME MORE. Beware, dear Sophie, and read some Tom Wolfe, Timothy O’Brian, Cheever, Ellison, Florence King, Emerson, Amy Tan, T.H. White, and especially some lesser-known Mark Twain nonfiction to balance him out. Catch-22 makes exactly the same point as Vonnegut does, but in a manner vastly more entertaining, complex, and, in general, talent-laden. In any event, please do not use the word “kinda” in your 5-page essay. But seeing as you used commas very properly in your comment, I have great faith in you. : )
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