In the course of reading Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, I was also ruminating on how much state standardized test preparation to do with my single section of sophomore English students. Neither the novel nor lesson planning has a traditional “answer.” Poor Things, like its literary mother, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is told in layers of stories and letters with various narrators, some of whom contradict each other on major details. In Frankenstein, the details involve which characters are virtuous and to what degree; in Poor Things, the narrators disagree on what actually happened and even if the main character is “born of a woman,” as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth. In the major narration, written by the medical student and eventual doctor Archibald McCandless, the main character, Bella/Victoria, is a re-animated dead person, ala Victor Frankenstein’s monster. But Victoria, in her post-script, claims McCandless’s book is fantastical before telling us the truth of her life. Gray complicates the veracity of both texts in his end notes. And by the end of those notes, I didn’t care what was true. I enjoyed the novel, and it made me think. What else can I ask from any experience? Since August, I’d been asking at work: will these sophomores have to take the standardized tests in April? They didn’t last year because of the pandemic. This year, we recently found out, they certainly do. These tests are considered in the state of Ohio’s “school report cards,” but this year, they won’t be. In some school districts, they are part of the evaluations of individual teachers, but this year, they won’t be. Most importantly, these tests determine if students graduate from high school or not. As of now, two and a half weeks before the English tests, no one has informed us if these tests will determine graduation or not. All year, students learn what they need to know, but the kids benefit from taking practice tests so they can learn the format and the style of questions. So: to prepare them, perchance it matters for more than data collection? Ay, there’s the rub (I wonder if Hamlet would score well on a standardized essay rubric. His reasoning is both repetitive and vaguely hypothetical). I mean, I don’t want to spend time in class on practice tests. However, my students will be judged by society on their test scores. I don’t want them to get the sense that they’re inadequate human beings because they’re not accustomed to this particular test format. Still, we could be reading poems, novels, and essays that are much more enlightening and having conversations that are much more fun. The last time I taught sophomores, at a different school, they were “honors” students. This was when Ohio changed the graduation tests. Because the new tests - the tests we use now - were to have older reading passages (students now answer multiple choice questions over Thoreau rather than over newspaper articles), with older prose style, I thought we should read some older texts. I decided Frankenstein might be fun to try. I was never a huge fan of the plot and pacing of the story, but I knew it would be full of teachable ideas. During five years using the novel in class, I learned more than anyone. Oh, what wonderful conversations that novel started among the 15-year-olds and me! Of course we got into the regular “responsibility of science” stuff, but then we could move into the responsibility of parents to their children, and the problems of children expecting their parents to be infallible. That led us into Victor Frankenstein’s egotism and the possible egotism of his creation, the guy the students always wanted to name, but who is never named. Conversations about the importance of names would ensue (and they had read Romeo and Juliet during their freshman year, so they were ready to consider how sweet that creature would be by another name). The lessons learned from scientific education and humanities education came up; we would delve into the economic opportunities of Frankenstein's upbringing and the poverty of the monster’s; and really, we just learned about everything that happens in life from that novel. None of it was on the test. Their graduation test consists of questions such as: “How does this symbol develop the author’s argument?” and “What does the author mean by ‘ardor’ in line 12?” These are perfectly good questions, and the reading skills they test are also good skills have. I wonder, though: what would Henry David Thoreau say about excerpts from Walden being used to test every child’s intelligence by computer? A most Thoreauvian problem: the students have been enduring tests like this since they were in elementary school, and they’re tired of everyone counting their beans. It is a task to be completed so they can fulfill someone’s else’s requirements. Frankenstein’s monster did not fulfill the aesthetic requirements of what it means to be human, so his creator abandoned him. I worry that we, the American schools, are creating a generation of testing machines who view learning as a task to be fulfilled. Perhaps all these tests should be chased to the remote Arctic circle until they die a lonely death. Instead, we use them to find out if teenagers fulfill the requirement of being able to sit quietly at a desk for hours on end while answering questions that interest them far less than constructing a philosophy of living in the world. If they can’t do it, we withhold diplomas from them like Victor Frankenstein withholds affection from his loved ones and monsters. Alasdair Gray’s Bella Baxter and her creator, Godwin Baxter, are the monster’s and Frankenstein's foils; they are the answer to: “What if the world’s greatest scientist loved his creation as much as he loved himself? What if the creation loved humanity instead of loathing?” As Frankenstein rejected his creature, “God” embraced everything about Bella. The creature, through his travels and reading, learned disdain for humanity, vowed revenge on his creator, and was infamous for murder. Bella/Victoria travelled and learned philosophy and science. She found love for humanity, named Godwin Baxter the only man she ever loved, and was known (in McCandless’ account, anyway) for physical “wedding,” as she put it. As Frankenstein gave his uncanny child nothing, Baxter encouraged Bella’s opportunities of curiosity and freedom. True, Bella’s physical beauty gave her social advantages that Frankenstein’s monster didn’t have. If I were answering a question about that for a graduation exam, I would look for the choice that involved the monster’s appearance symbolizing his creator’s lack of emotional investment (I would argue that Victor’s ardor in creating him was about Victor’s intellectual hubris, but I haven’t seen the answer choices yet, so who knows?). In some ways, Bella/Victoria ends the novel as bitter about the state of the world as Frankenstein’s monster, yet she’s still optimistic. She contradictory and confusing, and that’s perfect. She’s human. To paraphrase As You Like It, in our life, we play many parts. In the year of masks and social distance in the classroom while a few students Zoom in to join the rest of us, I would like my part as a high school English teacher to be, mostly, one that encourages my students to read, think, write, and – most importantly this year – talk to others about what they’re thinking. My sophomores have experienced the strangest first two years of high school that I could dream of in my philosophy. They do a passable job at answering multiple choice questions and writing timed essays when we practice. But when I start a conversation about Lord of the Flies and let them take over, I’m always impressed. Of course I want them to understand the usage of literary and rhetorical techniques, and I always want them to learn new words and think about how they are used. But I don't need standardized data to see if they're learning these things. I need their facial expressions. I’ll only see them three more times before the standardized test, but I think we’re finished with test prep. It’s time to read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. They’ll laugh when, in the first scene, some nobles call a cobbler a “naughty knave” and a “saucy fellow.” The laughter will inspire them to enjoy the language, we’ll discuss social hierarchies and individual ambition for the next few scenes, and we’ll take a time out for state testing. I’m excited to find out what they learn.
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April 2021
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