For more than two decades, I have spent a week every June reading Advanced Placement Literature and Composition exams in a room with one exalted leader at an elevated table, and many minions, including me, arranged in tables at the Question Leader’s feet.
This year, for the first time, I am the one seated at the elevated table.
Because I looked up to my many Question Leaders, I hold mental images of Jake, Linda, Jim, Mel, Susan and Alison. I always thought they had so much power. I knew they had glory because I, and everyone around me, didn’t even feel envy; there was no way we could ever fill their shoes.
Yet here I am, learning about the “power and glory” of anyone in charge of large numbers of people. I do important things: direct the reading of my question, choose the samples we read to norm the grading, and decide when we will have stretch breaks and what poems to read aloud after lunch.
But most of my time is spent on mundane tasks: I take care of lost earrings, and secure Band-Aids for paper cuts and hand sanitizer to help prevent the spread of illness in a crowded room. Taking roll is paramount, and although I rely on the leaders of each table to report absences daily, I also have to note when someone takes ill and leaves for a few hours. I receive complaints about the air-conditioning (by turns frigid and steamy) as well as the frozen orange juice at breakfast, the pork loin at lunch and, coincidently, the pork loin at dinner.
These issues are minor, and inevitable. So where is the power and the glory?
I have discovered that the glory is shared with those who work on the floor, and not confined to just those on the elevated platform. On “Professional Night,” we were equally inspired to hear Helena Viramontes, a Latina author who teaches at Cornell University, as she read excerpts from two of her novels.
A few days ago, I had read many more student exams on my question than my 360 readers. Today I realize I’ve read fewer — because while they’ve been reading from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., I have been busy with smaller room matters (like new batteries for the headsets all of us wear for communication.) In another few days, the readers’ expertise on my question will, at least, equal mine.
And power? I just hope to cajole my readers to stay in their seats the whole day with promises of ice cream in the afternoon. At any given moment, they have the power; I rely on their integrity and conscientiousness.
It’s lovely to be an exam leader. I know I set the tone for the room, and my choice of samples is paramount to guaranteeing a fair reading of more than 300,000 essays. But standing at the front gives me new appreciation for how important I was as a reader all those years, seated at the feet of people I admired and elevated — whom I now recognize were just like me. Question leaders are guides, but it’s the readers who make the reading accurate and fun.
What kids are reading
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre and data from booksellers. The works listed are some of the most popular student choices for this year’s Advanced Placement “open” question on the function of a symbol in a novel or play.
Top Choices on the 2009 AP Literature and Composition Exam
1. “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
2. “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad
3. “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin
4. “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare
5. “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
6. “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
7. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
9. “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett
10. “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
