Note from Jess: When I promised you a smorgasbord, I meant it. For many of us, the books we read in high school English classes defined our relationship with literature. It was Mrs. Nacca, my high school English teacher, who first showed me the power of literature to transform. I remember reading Song of Solomon as a senior in her class in 1998 and raising a ruckus about the ending; most of my classmates thought Pilate jumped to her death. I always believed that she flew away; I was near tears. This, obviously, had nothing to do with the A.P. exam, but I remember Mrs. Nacca, thrilled with our personal investment in the text, encouraging our conversation to go on and on throughout the entire period. Everyone needs a champion of literature in their lives, and I was so lucky to have her in mine.

I met Nate Hoffman in my backyard in 2008. That’s when he told me he’s been teaching A Clockwork Orange in his AP English classes for years. Since he’s been doing this kind of thing at Thompson Valley High School in Colorado for over a decade, I think he has a valuable perspective, one worthy of our attention. I wanted to share with you a few of Nate’s answers to questions I asked him over email this summer. Even though we didn’t have much time, Nate’s answers bring up some important questions: What makes a text “too long” for students born in 1994? How have students’ expectations of literature changed throughout the past ten years? And if plot summary is such a problem for the AP test graders, why doesn’t the AP encourage books whose plots are impossible to summarize? Why not encourage books that aren’t so canonly, or are too recently published to have SparkNotes? Why not read Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing in high school? Or what about Kelly Link or Shelley Jackson or even Ann Quin? Or if they have to stick to the canon, how can you possibly “summarize” the dinner table scene in To the Lighthouse? And why hasn’t the AP asked a question about Woolf’s book since 1988?

When you first started teaching AP Literature which books did you choose? Which books have you abandoned, which ones continue to resonate with your students?

My first year of teaching AP Literature was my second year teaching, the 2002-2003 school year. I was informed two weeks before the school year began that my colleague who had been teaching AP Literature for several years was moving away and he put my name in to replace him. I found out two days before the school year began that I was indeed teaching AP Lit. I opted to use the same books he was teaching and he was nice enough to give me resources for those units. The list that year: Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Heart of Darkness, The Things They Carried, King Lear, and A Thousand Acres. I’ve changed some of the texts and held on to others throughout my years.

This year, I will teach Gatsby, Slaughterhouse-Five, Hamlet, R & G are Dead, Heart of Darkness, A Clockwork Orange, Song of Solomon, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Others I’ve taught but let go include The Bell Jar, Invisible Man, A Room of One’s Own, A Raisin in the Sun, and Wide Sargasso Sea. The main reasons for dropping a text are student engagement and relative difficulty for a particular year’s students. Invisible Man, for example, was “too long.” A Room of One’s Own was reviled by students as boring, difficult and nothing but a long essay. The texts that have lasted are accessible, loaded with stylistic nuances, interesting (whether content-wise or style-wise), enjoyable, and allow for plenty of great discussions. But certainly some of the staying power is in my personal interest in the text or author and my ability to create fun activities that cut to the core of the work.

I know you have to teach a text certain ways so that students are prepared for their exams, but how often does a conversation veer away from, say, an AP approved conversation “understanding the narrative structure” into a conversation about the merits of the book, the narrator. Do you feel stifled by the fact that students have to get a certain “thing” out of a book?

I believe that learning is organic—it grows naturally from the classroom. Sure, I often start with an agenda, but a good discussion will take itself to uncharted places. And that’s just fine with me because there’s still learning going on. It may not be the meaning of a particular device in context, but student interpretations are still being explored in every discussion, so critical thinking is still occurring. I tell my students that the answer is “green.” There are numerous “right” answers to a question about literature just as there are numerous shades of green. Every student may take something different from a book and that’s part of the interpretive process. So I never feel stifled by the idea that students have to get a certain “thing” out of the book.

Tell me about some of those activities that help strengthen a student’s engagement with a book.

The books that get the best and most interesting responses are the ones that defy conventional story-telling, whether that be due to an original structure (the unstuck in time structure in Slaughterhouse-Five), a strange narrative device (the Nadsat language in A Clockwork Orange), or a fresh take on an old story (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Students are generally confused at first but tend to really engage in the concept and enjoy those books the most. They are more memorable due to the deviation from the usual.

But I also sometimes introduce the novels in interesting ways in order to acquaint students with the strange elements in them. For example, after students have read Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five, I introduce the unstuck in time quality that they will soon experience in Chapter Two with an activity in which I act like I’m unstuck in the school year. I start with an activity for A Raisin in the Sun, asking students to identify elements (and they think I’m asking them to do this for SL-5) that relate to Individualism vs. Collectivism and Assimilation vs. Black Nationalism. They sorta flounder around, trying to think of anything in Chapter One that fits with their gut feeling of what those terms mean. After a few minutes, I distribute a quiz on Act II of Hamlet. Someone always speaks up thinking I’ve made a mistake, but I tell them curtly that they’ve done the reading for the day and this is a pop quiz. After a couple minutes, I jump in time to the Heart of Darkness unit and read from the first page of the book, asking students if they noticed the “brooding gloom” that appears numerous times in the first few paragraphs. After that, I jump to an excerpt analysis passage from The Great Gatsby. This is an activity they’ve already done because I start the year with Gatsby. Usually things start to click at this point and students more readily enjoy the remaining jumps to A Clockwork Orange, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Song of Solomon.

The student reactions during the activity are priceless. Some students yell at me out of confusion and frustration: “I don’t understand what’s happening,” or “Why are you acting this way?” Some students just sort of go limp, waiting for it to end. Some students smile with recognition the whole time and participate in the activities during the jumps. After the activity, which takes 15-20 minutes, we process the experience and connect it to Slaughterhouse-Five. I like to get students inside some element of the text as early as possible. It’s an engaging strategy that helps them overcome a challenging concept and lets us focus on other issues. In the case of SL-5, instead of focusing on the “unstuck” device itself, students now understand it from the inside and can now focus on the effect it has on the novel and the author’s purpose in using it.

Would your school support you teaching something a little off the beaten path (although it’s not like Burgess isn’t!)? Like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber or Michael Oondatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid? Would it matter that these two books wouldn’t be mentioned on the AP exam or would that put your students at a disadvantage?

My school is pretty open to teachers selecting books as they see fit. Burgess hasn’t been featured on the exam. At the time when I started teaching, The Things They Carried hadn’t been featured on the exam. Same with The Bell Jar. It’s not so much about the text itself, it’s about the skills taught in studying the text. The kinds of books that AP frowns on are fantasy (even excluding Lord of the Rings) bestsellers (like Grisham or King) and teen stuff (Twilight, Harry Potter).

Why A Clockwork Orange?

The initial impetus for selecting A Clockwork Orange came when I learned that social studies teachers began using The Things They Carried (which I had been teaching for 3 years) as a book selection in a junior-level Modern America course. It turned out most of my seniors had already read it. I had read A Clockwork Orange in college at the University of Denver and remembered it as a unique challenge. I decided to use it with my AP classes for the 2005-2006 school year. There were really four concepts of the novel I wanted to focus on—the reasons I selected it: the Nadsat language created by Burgess, the main character of Alex, who defies easy categorization as protagonist or antagonist throughout the narrative, the dystopian future presented, and the concept of being a clockwork orange. All of those elements contribute to the satire presented by Burgess, and a deeper understanding of Burgess’ technique and purpose reveals said satire. A Clockwork Orange is always the most anticipated novel of the year for students. They have usually heard of the movie (as have parents) and are often influenced by that before beginning the reading, but the novel ends up being among the favorites of the year. Of course, there are always several students whose parent won’t allow them to read it…

I know you had a …. unique experience with a parent’s concerns about one of the texts your students read. Please do tell us about it.

So, this is one of my favorite stories… I received a message from a parent concerned about her 18-year-old son reading Slaughterhouse-Five. She said that she had read the novel when she was in college and didn’t believe it to be a good book. (She claimed she had read all of the books her children read for school.) It hardly deals with WWII, is full of swearing, and contains bestiality. Bestiality! She felt that if her son read it, he’d never not be able to picture that bestiality again. I had to think about that one. Where in the novel was there bestiality? After about 20 minutes of consideration, I realized that a photograph (daguerreotype, really) of a naked woman standing next to a pony was described a few times in the novel. Prepared now, I called the parent. I proceeded to share why I teach the novel—it’s satirical impact, it’s place in post-modernism, the ingenious methods of presenting the main character’s feelings of alienation and isolation. I told her I really had to think about where there was any bestiality. Her first reaction was to ask if her son could read another novel in place of Slaughterhouse-Five. I told that would certainly be acceptable and suggested Catch-22, The Red Badge of Courage, and All Quiet on the Western Front. I told her her son could go to the library throughout the unit, to which she replied with concern that her son wouldn’t be allowed in class. I reminded her that if he wasn’t allowed to read Slaughterhouse-Five, it wouldn’t be prudent for him to be in class throughout the unit. This concern with being singled out or different led to a new suggestion: could she just mark with a permanent pen all the parts of the novel she doesn’t agree with. I told her she certainly has the right to censor her son’s copy of the novel, but that he would most likely check a friend’s book to see if it was blotted out there too. This might reinforce negative behavior—curiosity with the proposed censored elements. This brought the parent to a new suggestion: would I agree not to make the bestiality elements of the novel a focus of the unit. I assured her I hadn’t ever brought them up in class and even had to think about where the bestiality was in the novel before calling her. She consented to letting her son stay in class and read Slaughterhouse-Five.

At this point, I told her that in the spirit of communication and transparency, I wanted to make her aware of a book we’d be studying second semester (A Clockwork Orange) that was very violent and contained rape. Her response was that rape is natural, as it occurs between humans, but bestiality is not. “Rape is natural.” Her words exactly. I was shocked! But on some level, I understood her viewpoint and admired her for initiating the conversation in the first place. First semester her son read Slaughterhouse-Five, and come second semester, her son read A Clockwork Orange, so she must have understood my viewpoint on some level, too.

Note from Jess: I asked Nate to share questions that have been asked on AP Exams. He shared with me a list that begin in 1970. Here’s a few to test your mettle (or to find ridiculously reductive and scoff at.

1972 AP Question: In retrospect, the reader often discovers that the first chapter of a novel or the opening scene of a drama introduces some of the major themes of the work. Write an essay about the opening scene of a drama or the first chapter of a novel in which you explain how it functions in this way.

1974 AP Question: Choose a work of literature written before 1900. Write and essay in which you present arguments for and against the work’s relevance for a person in 1974. Your own position should emerge in the course of your essay. You may refer to works of literature written after 1900 for the purpose of contrast or comparison.

1982 AP Question: In great literature, no scene of violence exists for its own sake. Choose a work of literary merit that confronts the reader or audience with a scene or scenes of violence. In a well-organized essay, explain how the scene or scenes contribute to the meaning of the complete work. Avoid plot summary.

1993 AP Question: “The true test of comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.”George Meredith Choose a novel, play, or long poem in which a scene or character awakens “thoughtful laughter” in the reader. Write an essay in which you show why this laughter is “thoughtful” and how it contributes to the meaning of the work. Choose a novel, play, or long poem by one of the following authors or another author or one of comparable merit. (no titles given; only authors names)

2002 (B): Often in literature a character’s success in achieving goals depends on keeping a secret and divulging it only at the right moment, if at all. Choose a novel or play of literary merit that requires a character to keep a secret. In a well-organized essay, briefly explain the necessity for secrecy and how the character’s choice to reveal or keep the secret affects the plot and contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Do NOT write about a short story, poem, or film.