2017 Q2 Mary Filak Comments

Reflections on Q2 2017

Mon 6/19/2017 14:32

2017 Q2 Pickle

Mary Filak

The following comments are based on my observations as a reader of Q2.They do not reflect the opinions of other readers or The College Board.

  1. Students struggled with the 18th-century language of Tobias Smollett.It was not always clear, even to a seasoned reader, which character was speaking or being described so that there were many who thought:
  • that Pickle was Emilia’s brother and Gauntlet her suitor,
  • that one of the dueling participants was killed, or
  • that Peregrine was the poorer of the two.

I think students would benefit from more exposure to pre-twentieth century prose so they become familiar with the more complex sentence structure and archaic language.

  1. Students readily perceived dialogue as a way to move the passage quickly to a crescendo of outrage; the most astute saw the dialogue as a preliminary dueling, a parry and thrust of “sir” coupled with skillfully worded insults.Most were also able to discern sarcasm in the characters’ polite address coupled with insults.
  2. Narrative pace proved a bigger stumbling block.The top writers deftly defined the term and explained how Smollett employed it in the passage; far too many tried to hack their way through that literary jungle with a machete instead of excising with a scalpel.It was quite apparent who had insight and who was feinting with that term.This is a new term for the prose question, and students were unprepared to deal with it.Perhaps “What’s narrative pace?” would make a good discussion thread for the listserv. I thought I knew what it was until I read almost 1,000 different versions of the definition, so I leave it to a more incisive wit to begin that discussion.
  3. Almost everyone attempted to describe tone, but the vast majority tried to discuss Pickle’s and Gauntlet’s tones (angry, petulant, restrained) rather than the overall tone of the passage.It was the rare insightful reader who saw Smollett’s humorous or satirical take on the idea of the “gentleman,” class consciousness and conventions of civility.These readers saw the irony in not only the “sir”/insult dialogue of paragraph one, but also the help-your-opponent-off –with-his-coat civility/duel to the death dichotomy of paragraph two.Students were rewarded for their ability to see the overall picture and respond with insight to the complexity and irony of the situation.So many writers tackled the characters’ tones instead of the narrator’s that it was the norm in the papers I read and didn’t detract from their scores as long as they were accurate and supported their opinion.I think here too we as AP teachers can help students to deal with tone better by discussing it in more of the passages we use in class, even if it is just a few minutes spent discussing and refining descriptive terms (“funny” vs“scathing,”“angry” vs. “piqued”) to more precisely describe the tone, and distinguishing an author’s or narrator’s tone from that of the characters.Controlling language through precise choices is a skill, like fencing, best learned through repeated practice.
  4. A final word about teaching critical lenses-they didn’t work for the most part on this prompt.We had Marxist interpretations where the lower class brother can never triumph over the upper class, controlling suitor who wants to use Emilia and toss her aside. Really?The feminist lens saw Emilia as a pawn and chattel who was not consulted about her fate, and the ubiquitous Freudian lens saw swords and pickles take on a whole new life, looming large in the minds of some writers.Sometimes a pickle is just a pickle.

All in all, a “dill-icious” reading.If you’ve read this far, dear reader, you know there must be a pun somewhere, even if it’s not kosher.

Regards,

AP Teacher Community

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