A Sisyphean Task

Preparing my students for their AP World History exam (in 66 days, no less) has occasionally felt as if we are engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to push the huge boulder of grief left by humankind up the hill. It also feels Sisyphean just in terms of getting the students ready to read and write at the level which these tests demand.

Last week was the end of the second term (we opted for a trimester system this year, eschewing the semester system with exams in January and June) and I decided that my students needed to endure the experience of what the AP test really feels like 10 weeks ahead of time so we could see how we are doing on this marathon.

So I took out old AP exams and work from test prep books and just cut up old tests for the multiple choice section and combed through the essay topics to choose three essays for them to explore. At this point in the course we are up to the dawn of the twentieth century (wait for applause…there…thank you…). We have covered from the Neolithic Revolution all the way up to the 20th century! Just one century to go in six weeks of class before review for the Big Day on May 14th.

But it isn’t just the scope of the exam that is mind-boggling (again…wait for the applause…there it is…) for the nearly 10,000 years of history the students must command. It is a long exam. It begins with 70 multiple choice (and these are the devilish kind—not the recognition kind—I mean they want you zooming through time and comparing Aztecs and Vikings and Chinese and Romans and Arabs and Japanese…whoa). After the 55 minutes of multiple choice comes the Document-Based-Question, for my money the best part of the exam. The DBQ, or when I am thinking about food (and when am I not??), as I call it the BBQ, offers 10 passages from different documents (and they could be prose or tables or photographs or graphs or maps) and asks for the students to synthesize the documents in a cogent essay—and: wait for this—all of this in 50 minutes.

Then they get a 5 minute break!

Finally, after the break come two essays, 40 minutes in length, to ponder, brainstorm, plan and write. Each of these two essays is the same format every year, just changing the time and place. The first of these is the “change over time but also continuities” essay. The student is asked to explain how a phenomenon (let’s say women’s rights) changes over a period of time, but also what stays the same. Hmmm….interesting. The other essay topic is always a compare/contrast in which the student must analyze relevant and direct comparisons among or between societies (let’s say the Spanish and the Ottomans).

Of course these are not simple tasks. They are monitored to parallel the work done in college, and so it is hard for high-school students to attack these assignments. They have to be so smart—and speedy! They cannot offer trite high-school-ish essays with cartoon villains, simplistic linear thinking and black-and-white student bluster. They are meant to be multi-dimensional, nuanced, precise and with relevant historical examples!

And they have to do all of this so quickly!

These essays are graded on a 9-point scale that, like the style of essay topics, has a uniform pattern. The first point one can earn is for an acceptable thesis. If you do not get that first point, you also cannot get points 8 or 9—a true argument of a thesis is the key to that golden door of extra points. And on the DBQ, if you do not use all the documents, you do not get that point. The points are fairly easy to understand: you must have a thesis, address all parts of the question, substantiate the thesis with four pieces of relevant historical evidence, make at least two relevant, direct comparisons, provide appropriate historical context, explain the process of change, show balance of changes and continuities…wow…so we have the tyranny of the coverage of the material in the course as well as sharpening and honing writing skills.

You can see it is not terribly over-dramatic (some yes, but remember the writer here!) to call this struggle Sisyphean!

So last week the nearly four dozen AP World History students sat down to write these exams. As you might expect, they had never taken a 190-minute exam. When last we took a comprehensive exam, in December, it was a 2-hour exam with 2 major essays. Now it was over three hours with three major essays. We are working at pushing that rock up the hill!

Since you are dying to know, I am sure, I will divulge the essay topics the students faced. The DBQ asked, “Based on the following documents, analyze imperialism as a positive and a negative force in the 19th century world.” Granted, we had explored this topic in the last few weeks, so they should have been primed for this. However, they had seen only one of the ten documents. So it was still important historical ground through which to plow. One of the requirements for success on the DBQ is to somehow “group” the documents into manageable units, but the students have to imagine what those groups should be. One way of dividing these documents would be by citizens of imperialist powers, and those documents written by subject peoples. But it is like the Iron Chef competition for historians going into a DBQ.

The changes/continuities essay asked for the students to “Analyze the changes and continuities in the Indian Ocean region from 650 to 1750.” This is work the students explored during our December break, but that is a long time ago! Hopefully they will mention historian Lynda Shaffer and her important essay on “Southernization,” in which she argues that the spotlight on the Indian Ocean (at that time) paved the way for Westernization to happen in the 19th-20th centuries…we discussed this historian (ad nauseum) so maybe her name will come up.

And the last essay asked “Compare and contrast the political and economic effects of Mongol rule on TWO of the following regions: China, Middle East, Russia.” I hoped that the residue of the 10th grade Middle Eastern history course might still be strong enough for this one, and the fact that we had explored in class how the Mongols were enjoying a bit of a revitalization in the History world these days…

Anyway, those are the essay topics.

I had thought I would discuss the exams in the blog, but I wondered if I was going to have an interesting angle on them (I feel a bit like Jimmy Olson on the Daily Planet!).

Through the genius of a schedule-planner my sophomores and juniors were scheduled to take their AP World History exams 48 hours apart. Oh well. Not smart, but what can do? This same phenomenon happened in December, with the sophomores going first. As I kept my ear to the ground, I learned, with relief that the sophomores wouldn’t budge in telling the juniors what was on the exam. I figured pay back time from the juniors to the sophomores.

Well, last week, at about 10:15 pm the night before the sophomores’ early morning exam, I had a knock at my door. There were four sheepish-looking sophomores asking to have a talk. They had “that look” that normally suggests remorse, or so-sincere-because-I-got-caught, with a hint of Let’s Make a Deal. These four guys explained that even though they hadn’t asked, a number of the juniors kept telling them the essay topics for tomorrow’s exams. They didn’t want to tell me the names of the chatty-Cathy juniors.

These four guys wanted to ask if I would come up with new essay topics.

Say what?

These four guys didn’t want the advantage of knowing the topics ahead of time. They wanted to see how good they really were going into our exam unawares—as if it were the big test in May.

I felt pretty stunned. Now, these four young men, the honorable Thaer, Abdullah, Raja and Robert, are great students anyway, but this was an unexpected bonus. They wanted to see if they were any good at this history game, and were not just worried (read: consumed) about getting an A. They hoped I didn’t mind coming up with some new topics, even though their exam was about 10 hours away.

Sure, it was some effort to look for balanced, challenging topics that simulated the breadth of the whole test, and I needed to type them up and get them copied. And sleep. But it was work of the easiest kind.

I told our headmaster the following day about this night-time visit, and I said, this may be the best story yet, academically, to come out of our school. Here are four young men, so interested in the learning process, and integrity, that they requested the rougher road of inquiry. What more could a teacher want? They wanted to embrace the unknown and tackle a subject for the esoteric struggle that it represents.

In that whole Sisyphean struggle of education, that boulder just took a leap up the hill.