Desks, tests, and other challenges

All semester long I've come into my American Lit classroom expecting a surprise: will the desks be arranged in rows or pods or will they form an elaborate labyrinth? The person who teaches in there before me likes to try every possible arrangement of chairs, but most days I've managed to work with whatever I've found. It's uncanny sometimes: I show up with a bit of group work and find the desks arranged neatly in just the right number of groups; I show up to give an exam and find the desks arranged to minimize opportunities for cheating. Neat.

Today I arrived early to make sure the arrangement was appropriate for a final exam and found a mostly workable room--except that a desk was missing and the only available replacement was about six inches too tall. All-righty then! Let's just snap our fingers and make a desk appear out of thin air!

Now my students are busy trying to make answers appear out of thin air. I hate to admit it, but I really enjoyed writing this exam and I hope they enjoy taking it. Is it wrong to take such pleasure in writing literature exams? I never try to trick or trip up students, but I do like to push them to show what they know and to think beyond the obvious.

In one set of questions I list pairs of poems and ask students to explain the similarities. Maybe both poems use free verse, but let's face it: 90 percent of the poems we've discussed in the last three weeks employ free verse, so the chances are pretty good that "free verse" will be a valid answer. But, as I told my students before they started the exam, sometimes the obvious answer isn't the complete answer or the best answer or the only answer. Think beyond the obvious.

We've spent some time in the past three weeks putting poems in conversation with each other, looking at allusions and influences and recycling of themes and language, so some of the questions on this exam put chunks of poetry right next to each other and ask students to analyze the conversation. Does Sylvia Plath have anything to say to Gwendolyn Brooks? How about James Wright, Franz Wright, and Theodore Roethke? Put Allen Ginsberg and Billy Collins in a room and what emerges--howling or lanyards or howling lanyards?

And then there's the essay question. I love this essay question. Love love love. Is that just weird or what?

So: one of the primary goals of a literature survey class is to equip students with the skills they need to analyze texts, so the essay on the final exam asks them to do analyze a particular poem, explaining how form and content work together to create meaning. Easy, right? Except I give them a poem we have not discussed in class, a poem that is in the textbook and was written by one of the authors we discussed but was not part of the assigned reading. At this point in the semester they ought to know what to look for in a poem, and I've given them a poem offering plenty of material to analyze. I want them to notice the obvious (line length matters!), but they'll need to show me that they can look beyond the obvious.

I'm looking forward to reading the results, but as they write, what's most obvious to me is that I'll miss this class with its daily surprises, its labyrinths and lanyards and howling about poetry. My sabbatical next year means that for the first time in 10 years, I won't be teaching the American Lit Survey in the spring semester. It's high time to rethink the course, to re-evaluate the reading and writing assignments and perhaps find some better ways to achieve course objectives. Time for me to think beyond the obvious! Who knows, I might come up with some new surprises, find some new tricks up my sleeve.

But not desks. I still haven't figured out how to make desks appear out of thin air.