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.
* * * *
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 9th 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, 3rd, 5th, and
11th 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.
