Blinded to the obvious answer

It's the easiest kind of reading quiz: print an excerpt from the reading on the quiz and ask students to analyze what that excerpt suggests about some relevant topic--in this case, what  Longfellow's poem "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz" suggests about the relationship between people and nature. Other quizzes will be more challenging, but this one early in the semester is intended to set a baseline, to show what conclusions students can draw about a poem that presents a metaphor as obvious as the nose on your face: nature as an "old nurse" tenderly teaching children what is written in the "the manuscript of God."

I tell them that there are many possible right answers, but I also point out that there are even more answers that are wrong, misguided, or incomplete. "Just be sure to support your response with evidence from the text," I tell them, and they do it, most of them.

Most students pick out the "nurse" imagery immediately and assume that it's referring to a medical professional rather than a nanny, but as long as they make the point that nature is trying to nurture and guide, I can accept that. A few argue that the poem portrays people as eternal infants dependent on nature's guidance, an interesting point we'll expand upon in class. With a few exceptions, the class performs well.

Those exceptions, though--I worry about those students. Generally they scribble superficial cliches with no apparent relationship to the reading; they repeat in several different ways the fact that the relationship between people and nature is complicated and deep without attending to the most obvious images in the poem, or else they offer arguments they think I want to hear (about how people take nature for granted by polluting too much) without offering a shred of evidence from the text. These are the students who will come up in a huff after class and tell me my grading is too subjective and the poem can mean anything to anyone, an argument that is true as far as it goes but willfully ignores the "nurse" metaphor that screams from every other line.

How can anyone ignore that screaming? Fear of poetry, I suspect, is the chief culprit, causing some readers to freeze when they see lines arranged in stanzas. Searching for secret meanings, they ignore the blatantly obvious. I need to know who these students are at the beginning of the semester, before we get to the less obvious stuff. (I'm look at you, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with your blighted "Blight.") 

Every semester I waffle about whether to start with a really difficult reading quiz (to signal high standards) or an easier one (to establish a baseline). This time I went with the easy choice and learned something important about my students, but I warned them: the quizzes will get more challenging as time goes on as I lead them, like Longfellow's nurse, toward more distant and difficult adventures.