Using the AP for Good, not Evil

Is it good or evil to give my AP kids this question (from the 2011 Lit AP) as a blog assignment for today? It's designed for a 40 minute handwritten essay response, so that makes it sort of perfect for a full class blog post.

In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following.

At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity.

Choose a novel or play that you have studied and write a well-organized essay in which you describe an “illuminating” episode or moment and explain how it functions as a “casement,” a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

In this case, instead of any novel or play, they'll need to answer this question by examining The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, our current text. Personally, I can't tell if I find this question arbitrarily arcane or potentially fascinating—or a little of both, I suppose.

The real question is whether I'm evil enough to ask my 10th graders to grapple with this question as they write about The Things They Carried. At first glance, it might seem a bit intense, but as I reflect on the question and cast my memory over The Things They Carried—easier to cast it now, having read the book six or seven times—I realize that it might be quite helpful to choose single illuminating moments of that text too.

Is it unfair to give 10th graders questions from the AP? No. Is it unfair to grade a 40 minute response to an AP question like they're AP students? Yes, so I won't do that. Will they find it difficult at first to understand the casement metaphor? Yes, and so will the AP kids. But we want them to struggle with difficult, nebulous problems and realize that defining the terms of a problem and struggling through it are part of learning. Parsing things for kids is like cutting up their food. At a certain age, you need them not to choke on it, so you do the cutting, but at some point, you've got to let them grab the knife and give it a whack. You watch them carefully to make sure nothing goes tragically wrong, but you let them do it.

Here's a prediction: at first, they'll ask me what a casement is, not because they're foolish but rather because they're wise enough to know that they need to know the definition in order to parse the question. Inexperience, however, will lead some of them to ask me instead of to read the question critically, so they won't realize that the question defines "casement" both literally as a window and metaphorically as an opening "onto the meaning of the work as a whole."

So today I'll be playing the swim coach who knows his kids can tread water but is asking them to do it in the deep end...as they give their knives a whack in order to find the window.

Update:

The reactions from the 10th graders ranged from quiet diligence to open terror. It was really hard for some kids to trust their own judgment and reading of the question. Will all of them address the question as the AP writers intended? No, but that's not the point. The point is that they do it on their own and that I grade them on what I value here: the attempt to work on their own and confront the text honestly.

Still, I do feel a bit like the swim coach who's watching a kid panic and splutter. Fortunately, no matter how much the kids freak out, the worst case scenario here is a terrible essay, which isn't fatal.