Nervous Nellie on Exam Day...and I'm the Teacher!

I meant to post this last week, but things have been pretty hectic in high school teaching land. The week and days leading up to the AP exam were pretty intense. There were a lot of senior activities that split the kids’ attention—and made it hard for them to focus on (what I think is important…) their AP Literature exam. 

Realistically, is my class the only one they have? Nope, they have 6 others…presumably 3 other core classes and 3 electives—which take varying degrees of time. 

Is my class *that* important? Nope. Family, extracurriculars, volunteering, working, music, sports, social life…I find these things imperatives to a healthy, well-rounded upbringing.

But wait, they signed up to take AP and I signed on to teach AP so that they could have a shot at getting a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP exam (and subsequently exempt a college class) and to be challenged in an academically rigorous and collegiate environment for the year. The exam is the culmination of their efforts.

All the books. (I assigned one a month since December. That was painful.) All the essays. All the Socratic Seminars. All the debates. All the Literature Circles. All the movie tie-ins. All the vocabulary quizzes. All the crazy rants I went off on about critical theory. All the technological assignments that had strict deadlines.  Tons of this was new to them. High school hasn’t been hard for a lot of the kids because they’re smart or the classes are easy. My class has been a big change for them. I’m okay with the fact that I challenged them.

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The Friday before the exam, a huge amount of the kids were on the senior trip to Disney. [I was more or less assigned to babysit a couple other classes due to  the lack of substitutes in the building. No big deal—I sent the extra kids into my classroom with a Disney movie on (well, it was Pirates of the Caribbean) and made a round-table arrangement of desks in the hallway. (Sort of the hallway—I have a little mini-entrance that I call the Vocabulary Vestibule because I hang up their comic versions of SAT words out here.)] Any of my AP students were to check in with their electives and then come back to work on AP. We worked on poetry, multiple choice, and applying literary vocabulary. It was groups of 2 to a dozen kids plus me—on a lot of coffee. (I talked re-heeaaaalllllly fast.)

We milked every practice discussion question for what it was worth and we debated the best ways to approach the essays. Kids who had felt nervous about their abilities got praise from their peers (and me) and hopefully took some of the weight of their self-doubt off of their shoulders. We argued about the reasoning for studying old, ancient, dusty poems and the relevance-slash-confusion of modern, new ones. We brainstormed the books we’ve read (mostly from this school year)—Invisible Man, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, The Bean Trees, Robinson Crusoe, The Bluest Eye, Great Gatsby, Night, Julius Caesar, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Joy Luck Club…They realized that they have more stuffed in their brains than they think. 

I wished I had a small, laser-like focused AP group every dang day. It was very awesome.

Leading up, every day after school, I worked with kids on whatever they wanted help on. We had a movie afternoon and compared “Children of Men” to 1984. We watched parts of 1984 and scoffed at the movie-making techniques of only a handful of years ago. We watched parts of Wall-E and discussed how this had shades of Bradbury and Orwell. 

College Liberal-arts background: you’ve served me well. 

So, May 9^th was the exam and I went and met the kids in the library before they headed off. It was “Decade Day,” so many of them were in ridiculous outfits and costumes—notably many 1950-60’s Doris-Day looking fancy dresses and heels that, according to the kids, were inspired by The Help. I was in a hippie skirt, along with many of my Flower-Children! They weren’t to take anything with them, so I offered to hold onto cell phones—

I think a picture is worth more than a description here. 

Here’s the strange part to me—I had a large number of kids taking the exam—between 70 and 80. I’ve had plenty of kids taking high-stakes exams—Graduation tests, EOCT’s, 3^rd, 5^th, and 11^th grade Writing Test. I’ve never *felt* anything like this.

I was nervous. 

The whole morning (3+ hours!) I was pacing and just a wreck! I had the butterflies in my stomach and a dry throat—I was just so dang nervous for my babies. I can’t imagine having children and watching them perform on a stage. That must be torture. 

When they started trickling in to collect their (eh-hem) expensive electronic devices, I felt the weight lifting off of my shoulders. For better or for worse, they’d taken their exam. Most of them felt confident about the multiple choice (“You gave us way harder questions than ones that were on there, Miss G.!”), the poetry essay (“I just annotated it, TPCASTT’d it, and wrote everything I could think of!”) and the Free-response essay (“Is it okay that it seemed JUST like the essay I wrote for you about ---- book? The prompt seemed familiar!”). The prose essay was something modern and they didn’t enjoy it, but oh well. Some of them didn’t space their time well and ran out. Oh well. Some of them came in beaming and pleased with themselves…and that’s what makes me happy.

So I made it through a year of teaching AP Literature. Check one more curriculum off the list for me. The kids learned a bunch of stuff. Their writing improved vastly and I greatly desensitized them to their allergy to reading. I’d say it’s been a good year.