This Story Is 100% True
We had our first test of the semester on Tuesday in my English Romanticism class. It was brutal. The instructor, Professor Twitchell, had warned us that it would be difficult. He had emphasized it repeatedly, in fact. But you can never be too sure what one person’s definition of hard is, so I didn’t fret about it, and, in any case, he told us if we took decent notes we’d do well.
On Tuesday morning, however, as the test was handed to me and I looked over the fifteen or so questions, I was crestfallen. While I knew some of the material right off the bat, some of it had long since disappeared into the recesses of my mind. I hadn’t anticipated that he’d give us lines from poetry or prose and ask us to identify the author, title and significance of the passage. And I blanked on a question asking us to cite three “solitary” figures in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nor could I remember the genre of “The Prelude”, which I confused somehow with the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I felt even worse, though, as my classmates all finished their tests before me and departed, leaving me almost alone in the room to struggle and wonder how they could possibly have been better prepared.
This morning I came to find out that they probably weren’t better prepared. My classmates were all chatting about how terrible the test was, trying to see if they could, between themselves, put together the bits and pieces that they missed. When Professor Twitchell entered the room he seemed to recognize we were all worried. He said he hadn’t graded them all, but he must have graded enough to know that a lot of people missed a lot of questions. Moreover, I think he sensed we were all a bit resentful. He is a cheerful and good humored fellow. Brilliant, too. “I know…you’re all angry. So, let me hear it,” he said. I expected a hiss and some boos, maybe, but one kid shouted, “you son of a bitch!”
Filed under: Literature and Books, School on February 28th, 2008 | 2 Comments »