Test Prepping Over the Edge: What If?

by Kathie Anderson, Beavercreek High School, Beavercreek, Ohio

What if T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock married Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill?
What kind of wedding might you imagine? What would their married life resemble?
What would they discuss each morning over almond cakes and tea?
Would Miss Brill resuscitate her fur stole and play out a little panorama each day, just for him?
Would he still be listening for mermaids?
On what do you base your perceptions?

Although there are no scenarios like the one above on the English Literature and Composition Exam given to AP students in May, the test presumes a foundation of literary knowledge and the ability to make astute, significant connections between ideas. I have found great success in using "what-if" questions, a sort of Socrates meets Sherlock Holmes approach, as one way of encouraging my students to think critically and with originality.

What-if questions require synthesis just beyond the reach of predictability and formulas. There are no study guides or SparkNotes for what-ifs. Students must immerse themselves in their readings, form evaluations, and offer solutions based upon evidence. These kinds of questions take on lives of their own and offer opportunities to integrate genres of writing and the arts in a variety of ways.

One of my favorite projects involves "companion book groups." At the start of the project, students move around the room "book shopping" from a group of novels I provide. They form groups based upon their choices. Then I combine the groups to form literary circles. For example, the most recent project paired students reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt and Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The characters and themes of the paired novels are somewhat parallel, although the tone and the plot developments vary widely. All of them concern social awareness and the search for self-identity. Students read one book and then the other over a span of four to five weeks, and spend time in their circles discussing their readings, taking discussion notes, and marking thematically significant passages with Post-it notes. Their group notes are graded easily using a short rubric.

Next, the students develop analytical papers connecting a common major theme of their books. They submit thesis statements, and we share a number of these in class prior to the first draft. The papers convey the students' ability to harvest an underlying message in one work and apply it to another. I see the paper as a litmus test of their reading and true comprehension, as well as an assessment of writing skills. It is also an anchor for our next step.

At the end of the reading and meeting dates, I assign a multigenre project inclusive of both novels. This starts with the development of many what-if questions about the books. For example, a student might ask:

1. What if the characters of both books were members of the same support group? What group might it be? What might they discuss?
2. What if the protagonist of book A became the roommate of the protagonist in book B? Would they get along? What memories might they create?
3. What if the protagonists of book A and book B wrote letters or poetry to each other, or shared emails, or sent gifts? What would they say or send?
4. What if one character invited another to a wedding, a weekend retreat, a funeral? What would the protagonists buy, wear, want? How would they differ in their values? If they went out together, where would they go? What might they do?
5. What if author A were critiquing book B? What might he or she say?
6. What if the same social climate present in book A occurred in B? How would this affect the attitudes and motives of the characters?

The products resulting from these kinds of questions convey students' deeper understanding of and engagement with the motivations of the characters. For example:

1. One student created scrapbooks for Tess of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and for Edna Pontellier of The Awakening, in which he depicted both the superficial and the spiritual sides of his heroines and their many heartbreaks (see below).
2. One student brought in a wooden box filled with the memorabilia of Frank McCourt―"letters" from his mom and dad, and to them; drawings done by the young Frankie; a "ticket stub" for his trip home from America―and then another student tied that to a packet "found" in Naomi's attic in Obasan, filled with painful stories of separation and the Japanese internment.
3. In yet another piece of redacted fiction, the characters under the thumb of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest might be visited by airmen on leave from Catch 22. They might discuss the meaning of true insanity or trade escape plots. Their memories might be documented in a psychiatrist's report or in letters written after the fact by the escaped Chief.

A scrapbook page that shows the Durbyfield family tree.

A scrapbook page designed to help Edna Pontellier sort out her life's direction.

The multigenre project requires that students learn new strategies of interpretation and make choices thoughtfully and independently. This project also demonstrates the importance of point of view.

The finale of the project is a sharing celebration. Each literary circle arranges its artifacts and prepares a short presentation of its "finds." Some of the groups play soft "theme" music. Some present in the form of a skit or news program or game show. Sometimes the artifacts themselves include live performance, a video, an audiotape, or original music scores. Students have time to move around the room examining their peers' projects.

The what-if question and its various applications are only one tool I have used in my AP classes. Of course, we do timed essays and samples of released AP test questions! We use those essays as the basis of lessons in revision and as vehicles for self-and peer review. We learn to write our own AP-style questions for poetry we read and for passages we find. We talk about literature using literary terms, and we write research-driven rhetoric. The students are offered plenty of servings at the buffet table of testing skills. However, I personally feel that feeding my students techniques for taking the AP test is not enough; I would be doing them a real disservice if I failed to feed their imaginations as well.

Epilogue: Miss Brill would wear her fox to the wedding; Prufrock would think her old-fashioned and quaint, but we all suspect that she is secretly the mermaid of his dreams.

And as for the wedding cake, according to three of my students:

"It would be decorated very well, but might not taste so good. The top layer would be honey cake with almonds, but the bottom layer would be bittersweet coffee cake. Guests would eat their cake with coffee spoons."

Works Consulted

Daniels, Harvey. (2002). Literature circles, 2nd ed. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Eliot, T. S. (1998). The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, In Thomas R. Arp (Ed.), Perrine's literature, 7th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Mansfield, Katherine. (1998). Miss Brill. In Thomas R. Arp (Ed.), Perrine's literature, 7th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Romano, Tom. (2000). Blending genre, altering style. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Kathie Anderson has taught English and humanities at Beavercreek High School, Beavercreek, Ohio, for 13 years. She has an M.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University and an M.Ed. from Wright State University. She earned her National Board Certification in 1999. You can contact her at Kathie.Anderson@beavercreek.k12.oh.us.

Return to top