After spending two and a half hours freezing half to death while my American Lit students took their final exam, my brain is melting under the heat of their pressure-cooked prose. These exams show the same wide range of understanding that I'm accustomed to seeing in survey courses, but one section seems to have stymied a large group of students at all levels: given some characteristic chunks from two long poems, students had to identify the authors and titles (A.R. Ammons, "Garbage," and Allan Ginsberg, "Howl") and write a little bit about the ideas or techniques the two poems share. I thought this would be the easiest question on the exam because these two poems are so distinctive in both style and content; "Garbage" is the only poem we studied in this unit that's arranged in couplets, and nothing else we've read in this unit looks the least bit similar to "Howl."
And yet: more than half of the class got this section wrong. Many identified "Howl" as "Garbage" and vice versa, while others offered up a wide range of authors, including Sylvia Plath, Billy Collins, and Jack Kerouac (who makes more sense than the others, but still!). Even if a student has difficulty figuring out what a particular poem is trying to say, shouldn't he or she at least notice the distinctive shape the poem makes on the page? Even if I'd substituted gibberish for the words, students should have been able to look at the lines and identify the authors, especially given the limited number of poets we studied in this final unit. Further, I selected sections of these poems that we had discussed at length in class, so even if they didn't read on their own, they should have heard the words more than once if they'd been paying attention.
Maybe they're trying to study poetry without actually looking at it. That's a novel method, but for a large group of my students, it clearly isn't working.
1 comment:
Hi Bev
Thank you for the post: I've had that happen on my finals, too, and it's oddly disturbing (did I just DREAM that we discussed the poem at length? didn't they all laugh when I said, repeatedly, lines from poems I said they should remember for something like Jeopardy, or, perhaps, the final?).
Anyway, one way of trying to circumvent this that I've been using lately is having students do "pop ups" on the poems (or sections of poems) we discuss. They don't literally do this on a computer with hyperlinks (though that would be cool): instead, they use different colored pens (I supply) to annotate a copy of the poem (since they usually fight me when I beg them to write in the book) in a variety of ways before we discuss it, then add to their annotations after we discuss the poem as a class. Then they, theoretically, leave the class with a multicolored analyses of style, tone, theme, reactions, connections, etc etc etc. that they can then bring to my open book final (if they remember).
It's not foolproof, naturally, but it did lead to stronger responses on the final.
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