“Exam Fatalism”

The days have grown cold and short, and my students have put a semester of homework behind them. They deserve a break. But they’re getting . . . an exam.

I’d like to be the kind of high school teacher who takes pleasure inflicting the exam on his students. You know the type — clomping their hands together in satisfaction as they enter the room with the stack of exams, pacing the aisles of the classroom with a weather eye for cheat sheets or an overconfident visage. Those teachers always seem so certain of themselves, sure that they’ve been teaching the real thing: facts, knowable truth that can be assessed with the clarity of a chemist measuring PH. Their exam will reveal all — a student’s strengths and, most of all, weaknesses.

Alas, I am not that kind of teacher. My subjects — literature, writing and music — are hopelessly mired in judgment calls and subjectivity. Though I’m convinced that no skills are more versatile and essential than reading and writing and no discipline is more glorious than music, I present my exams with a mixture of regret and apology.

Traditional exams, it seems to me, can’t measure what really matters in my classes. They may be good for assessing competence with the quadratic formula or knowledge of the periodic table. But, even then, exams seems more like an evaluation of a student’s short-term memory than an assessment of wisdom or synthesis.

Rather than give a two-hour exam on participle phrases and The Great Gatsby, I’d like to invite the kids to a wild party where they’d discuss imagery and dialogue with Thomas Pynchon and Ursula LeGuin. I’d like to found an upstart poetry journal, and the exam would be the editorial meetings where my students would justify their selections and rejections. Or I would arrange for my students to draft the user manuals for all future VCRs, then grade them on whether the public finally understands how to tape a show that’s on when they’re not home.

These ideas, alas, are not practical. And a certain amount of practicality is expected come exam time. After all, kids have to actually take these exams. And then, unfortunately, I actually have to grade them. And these days, with the pressure to get into a good college, families are pretty touchy about those grades. Back in the day, teachers could joke about grading tests by tossing them down the stairs. No longer.

So I wind up giving exams that use the sledgehammer tactic of multiple choice or the hocus-pocus of a theme essay. And I’ll grade them dutifully, never truly knowing whether my students draw from my class the lessons I want to teach.

What are those lessons? I want to teach my students to love telling and listening to stories; to feel joy at the prospect of hearing a new word or a just-written song; to experience an electric jolt realizing that the world is filled with unexposed film, blank paper and idle concert hall stages, all awaiting them. I want to teach my students the kind of desire that can only be whetted with hard work and the skills it might take a lifetime to master.

There’s no exam to assess even a sliver of that, and I know I’m a fool even to admit my ambition.

I suppose I should be both less pessimistic and more ambitious. A great teacher can compose clever exam questions that will reveal subtle writing and thinking skills. Colleagues of mine have developed sophisticated group exams integrating media and skills such as film, discussion, writing and practical problem-solving. But the more clever the exam is, the subtler its assessment, the more subjective and difficult the grading is. So, more often than not, I settle for the clarity of the same old thing. The school makes you give an exam, after all.

But as I collect the papers, I’m usually overcome by a certain exam fatalism. As Hilary or Nick or Paula hands me their stack of powder blue exam books, I point to the window. “Get out of here,” I say, and they’re more than happy to comply — eager to get some lunch, hang out with friends and then (of course) start studying for their next exam.

And they’re usually through the door by the time I finish explaining that the only real they’ll ever take is “out there.” And it is just beginning.