subtext

My students are taking their midterms. For the last couple of weeks they have been asking me if I was giving a midterm. (I thought it was required). When I said yes, they would look at me quizzically and ask, “Over what?” It amuses me still that they think they don’t do anything in my class. They read self-selected texts, they write on self-selected topics; they freely confess that they have read more books this semester than they have read their entire high school career; yet, they still think they don’t do anything. It is only a real English class, I guess, if they are doing vocab worksheets, and all reading the same text that the teacher has to explain to them before they write the same formulaic essay about the symbolism of the whale, or the rose, or the crucible. Ez came home the other day and confessed that he hated English, and had no interest anymore in it. Ez reads voraciously, since he was in third grade. He writes well, although he doesn’t think so. He and his friends exchange books at Christmas and give each other book store gift cards on birthdays. Yet, somehow the AP program they are all in has killed any of the pleasure they find in texts. Which brings me back to my midterms, my students have to answer two out of three essay quesstions, one is about the books they have read this semester, one is about the writing they have done, and one asks them to think about how the reading and writing they have done has influenced the way they read and write. At first they are stunned, but when I read them, they have written some of the most thoughtful pieces they have done all year. They know what they have done; as do we all.