I was talking to a Ph.D. student I work with, Colleen Clemens, about her experience working as a grader for the AP English exam. She had been assigned to work on a question about an Indian author, Anita Desai (the passage was from Fasting, Feasting), and she was shocked at how the students tended to use the passage as an excuse to throw out a series of flagrant generalizations about India and Indian culture. Incidentally, Colleen went with a group of first-year students to India last December, so she’s seen parts of the country herself. The following post, then, is a one-off essay by Colleen:
Recently, I served as a reader for the AP English exam. Imagine a room with 1500 college and high school teachers sitting on folding chairs (with no lumbar support) for eight hours a day, seven days straight, reading the almost one million essays written by nervous, twitchy high school students hoping to test out of their first-year college English course. In a stroke of luck and irony, I was assigned Question Two on this year’s exam, in which students were asked to read a passage from Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting and do a close reading to glean insight into Arun’s experience as “an exchange student.â€
As an AP grader, I read the same question all week (over 1100 essays.) In order to make us efficient grading machines, we spent a morning calibrating our responses to the 0 to 9 grading scale—we could see right away that we had much to learn about India from these high school students. Though reading 1100 essays has dulled my memory, I still know that several times I had to stop and mutter to myself comments such as “Yes, there are trees in India†or “No, India is not all trees.†I admit, after traveling there in December, much of India made little sense to my western sensibilities—I am still not sure why I saw an elephant walking in Hyderabad traffic or how people can cross the street with such confidence in Delhi—and I am certainly not an expert on India. But I know that there are bound to be trees in a country of over a million square miles.
I haven’t read the Desai book, but looked it up after I got home. The passage on the exam comes right at the end of Desai’s novel:[FROM Fasting, Feasting]It is Saturday. Arun cannot plead work. He stands despondent, and when Melanie comes to the door, dressed in her bathing suit with a big shirt drawn over her shoulders, and stares at him challengingly, he starts wildly to find excuses.Arun “cannot plead work†and must go on a Saturday excursion with Melanie and Mrs. Patton. Clearly, there is tension in the family (i.e., Melanie has an eating disorder, and Arun knows it), but Arun goes into the “insidious†wild though he would prefer to be back in town. The passage—though only a few paragraphs—evidently was all the students needed to make grand claims about India such as the ones that follow:
Mrs Patton will not hear them. No, she will not. Absolutely not. So she says, with her hands spread out and pressing against the air. ‘No, no, no. We’re all three of us going. Rod and Daddy have gone sailing on Lake Wyola and we’re not going to sit here waiting for them to come home—oh no.’
Arun must go back upstairs and collect his towel and swimming trunks. Then he follows Melanie to the driveway where Mrs Patton is waiting with baskets of equipment—oils and lotions, paperbacks and dark glasses, sandwiches and lemonade. With that new and animated prance galvanising her dwindled shanks, she leads the way through a gap in the bushes to one of the woodland paths.
Melanie and Arun follow silently. They try to find a way to walk that will no compel them to be side by side or in any way close together. But who is to follow whom? It is an awkward problem. Arun finally stops trying to lag behind her— she can lag even better—and goes ahead to catch up with Mrs Patton. He ought to help carry those baskets anyway. He takes one from her hands and she throws him a radiant, lipsticked smile. Then she swings away and goes confidently forwards.
‘Summertime,’ he hears her singing, ‘when the living is eeh-zee–’
They make their way along scuffed paths through layers of old soft pine needles. The woods are thrumming with cicadas: they shrill and shrill as if the sun is playing on their sinews, as if they were small harps suspended in the tress. A bird shrieks, hoarsely, flies on, shrieks elsewhere, further off—that ugly, jarring note that does not vary. But there are no birds to be seen, nor animals. It is as if they are in hiding, or have fled. Perhaps they have because the houses of Edge Hill do intrude and one can glimpse a bit of wall here or roof there, a washing line hung with sheets or a plastic gnome, finger to nose, enigmatically winking. Arun finds the hair on the back of his neck begin to prickle, as if in warning. He is sweating, and the palms of his hands are becoming puffy and damps. Why must people live in the vicinity of such benighted wilderness and become a part of it? The town may be small and have little to offer, but how passionately he prefers its post office, its shops, its dry-cleaning stores and picture framers to this creeping curtain of insidious green, these grasses stiffing with insidious life, and bushes with poisonous berries—so bright or else so pale. Nearly tripping upon a root, he stumbles and has to steady himself so as not to spill the contents of the basket. [Anita Desai, From Fasting, Feasting]
Arun cannot possibly speak English. He is so incapable, Mrs. Patton must speak in simple sentences (yes, they conflated the narrator with the character) so Arun has any chance of understanding her. And when she sings “Summertime…when the living is eeh-zee,†Arun doesn’t know the word “easy†so he mishears her (this is an example of “epizeuxis,†a word not one person at the table had seen before—lots of students gave us what we would call the “tour of literary devices,†i.e., “on your left you will see alliteration, on your right you will see pathetic fallacyâ€). Because he cannot speak English, he doesn’t want to go on the trip. In fact, Indians like to work so much, he wants to work on Saturday (missing the subtlety that he “cannot plead workâ€) instead of going to the beach, an all-American day that he does not understand because he wants to work; one must remember that Indians are very studious. He wants badly to go into town; India is so crowded, Arun is afraid of having the space available to him by being outdoors. But at the same time, India is a jungle (we saw this word so many times, we actually started a pool at our table, chipping in a quarter and the next person to see it would win the pot) full of wild animals such as tigers. Arun feared being in the wilderness—he couldn’t see the birds, so he didn’t know what else was lurking in the wild. And why go outside when he can be in town where he can enjoy the air conditioning, something he would not have seen in India (many students added this air conditioning detail though the passage does not mention it) even though India is REALLY hot? One student exclaimed “He actually got sweaty!†In fact, Indians live in deserts and are afraid of “woodsy†areas. Inside Arun wouldn’t have to see birds—a scary sight since there are no birds in India. Since India is a primarily urban country, Arun would not know how to be in nature, especially when people in India don’t go on picnics. How could they go on picnics? The women would have to walk behind the men and they would trip over their veils! That is, the few women Arun would have ever seen since Indian men don’t see Indian women, women who don’t wear makeup and are more “natural†than American women. Instead of picnicking, the Indian people who are mostly Muslim spend their time worshipping cows, which Arun would certainly have wanted to do on Saturday instead of going to the beach.
I wish I were making up or exaggerating in this pastiche, but I am sad to report I am not (and I didn’t even mention the students who read Arun as a Native American on the Trail of Tears). Ultimately, many students did note his “uncomfort,†“cultural electrocution,†“discomfortableness,†and “awkwardidity,†but of concern is how angry they were with Arun for not “getting on board†and enjoying an all-American day at the beach. Of when Arun trips over a branch, one student boldly stated “Finally Arun trips, putting a cherry on top of the ice cream sundae that is his misery.†The tenor of many of the essays was that Arun should see how lucky he is to be in the United States and get over his fear of the wild. Most kids saw that he felt uncomfortable, but the general attitude was he was just a spoiled brat—as our question’s skit writers put it, Arun is a “privileged little Punjabâ€â€”who doesn’t see the glory of the west. Scariest of all were the students who read Arun as an animal himself, so out of the range of human experience they couldn’t even see that he was a boy.
Some astute students did notice he is silenced by the overbearing Mrs. Patton, that the tension between him and Melanie may have been cultural and gendered, that he feels out of place because he is an exchange student, not simply because he is an Indian out of his “comfort zone‖“a stranger in a strange land.†In the end, the question writers did the students a disservice by writing “Indian writer Anita Desai†in the prompt: this subtle othering of the writer opened the door for students to make wild and unfounded claims about India using Arun—and Desai—as their vehicle. Those students who noticed the difficulty of negotiating between cultures scored well on the question and may perhaps be exempt from their first-year composition course. The others will be sitting in my class next year, and I will do all I can to debunk their repository of generalizations about India and the rest of the world.
Even if you haven’t read the novel, what do you think of the passage above? What does it tell us about the relationship between Arun, Melanie, and Mrs. Patton, and what is the author doing with all of the strange imagery about the “benighted wilderness”?
And — would this passage by the “Indian writer, Anita Desai” lead you to comment on whether there are trees in India, whether or not there are cities, electric power, English-speakers or automobiles there?
“this subtle othering of the writer opened the door for students to make wild and unfounded claims about India”
Although I haven’t read the novel, his taking of the basket is a retention of masculinity (he wasn’t invited on the fishing trip). Also, the benighted wilderness represents a sexual awakening he isn’t ready for, he wants to build a life first, on dry land, not close to “these grasses stiffing with insidious life, and bushes with poisonous berries—so bright or else so pale.” Cherry, anyone? May I skip English now?
I have come across this line of thinking before, and really rankles. It isn’t often expressed in polite company, but you hear it in conversations about other immigrants. My own wife, who came to the US as a young child, has said this to me – that I should be thankful for being in America.
It isn’t that I am not thankful, but the notion ignores the complexity of emotions one feels during the process of immigration. It marginalizes everything an immigrant gives up by moving to another country. It also smacks of hubris – when school kids who have probably never lived anywhere else in the world assume that living in America is so unquestionably superior to living anywhere else.
Fascinating post. the sybarite i am, i prefer to enjoy the emotion inspired by the plot rather than worry why i am thinking what i am. hence i only have a reaction, rather than questions in my mind on why people are behaving they are. my reaction in this case is of a sense of doom, a feeling like there is an impending break-up or something sick about to happen. it may be the build up to the climax . i thot desai did well to build up the mood. whether the guy was indian or not, didnt register – the only person of whom i formed a mental image was mrs patton, of the weedy shanks – and her oversized glasses.
Poor guy must have been absolutely traumatized by all those venomous cobras he was made to wrestle as a baby.
In India, we may have 99 problems but a beach ain’t one. Anyway, cow-worshipping Muslims go to the beach on Fridays, not Saturdays. Saturdays are reserved for playing cricket with tigers in the jungle.
No no, it wasn’t a sundae. It was a Saturdae.
It exposed and broke my personal fallacy that kids who take and test out of AP English are somehow cosmopolitan, cultured and incapable of getting past bigoted generalizations.
Again, they were asked to “do a close reading to glean insight into Arun’s experience as ‘an exchange student.'” This makes me wonder if the students then wrote what they felt or, like many standardized test takers, what they thought the graders would want to see. What if it weren’t your friend grading this test and another less associated with and sensitive to Indian and its varied expressions here and back in India. I’d like to see what the answer is in the “back of the book.”
Perhaps I’m over-analyzing and these students are just shits.
Oops, the last part of first sentence should read “incapable of bigoted generalizations.”
Also, my last comment sounds like an AP-level “close reading to gain insight” itself.
Which is why I never bother about reading these English “fiction” works by “Indian” authors. These (censored) like Anita Desai, Arundathi Roy and others just ape their pretentious, high society, moccha drinking US author pals in repeating the same tired, trite BS about India. If I wanted to read such unadulterated trash, I could just pick up NYT and read Amy Waldman or Barbara Crosette’s “columns”.
As a (white) product of the American school system, I can easily say that 99% of what I know of India is self-taught.
Number of grades in which I learned about the US Civil War: 5 Number of grades in which I learned about places east of “Asia Minor”: 1, maybe 2 Number of times I heard about Partition in a pre-university classroom: 0 🙁
I’m obviously not proud of this. Our school system is an atrocity. So I’m unfortunately not surprised by some of those ignorant statements, especially when you consider they’re trying to fill up a certain amount of essay space in a short amount of time (the “throw everything at the wall” strategy often comes into play, not that that’s an excuse). “No birds in India” really flabbergasts me though. Even if you don’t know a Hindu from a Muslim, shouldn’t that defy basic common sense?
DesiDude, sorry to be the English prof. here, but don’t you mean “adulterated trash”? 😉
Ankur, interesting speculations. You get a “5”. But the novel you’re imagining is in some ways more interesting than the novel Desai actually wrote!
Khoofia’s take on it is on the mark. This passage comes just before the novel’s climax…
After reading that overlong excerpt, now I know why I prefer watching movies to reading books!!!!
I’m just surprised they have anything remotely non-Western on the AP English Exam. When I took the AP Lit Exam (I’m assuming this isn’t the Lang Exam), I think the passages were by authors from no farther east than maybe Russia. To be honest, I’m kind of glad it was like that; I think the temptation to inject a lot of my own so-called experience would be too great if I got this passage.
None of this is surprising. You can be quite successful academically in the US without knowing anything at all about India/Asian religions. I suppose that will change to some degree. Many of my Ivy League educated colleagues ask questions like “Do you speak Hindu?” or “How does Hinduism fit in the Old & New Testaments (i.e. implying that it must fit in an Abrahamic taxonomy)?”. I am curious to know what degree of knowldge the State Dept. Foreign exam required on India/Asian religions 10 years ago…
6 · Maitri said
I’ve seen stuff like this from university seniors…in a Post-Colonial Lit Class. Mmhm. Incredible.
BTW, “awkwardidity” is a perfectly cromulent word.
I read Clear Light of Day and was done with Anita Desai, too moody for my taste. So is her daughter, though both are very evocative writers.
What do you think would happen if Indian kids are given a similar exercise using a passage from Chinua Achebe?
I think this passage says more about the generalized attitudes of high-schoolers towards those they consider “foreign” in our post-9/11, it’s-okay-to-hate-immigrants country than it does about Anita Desai, or whether there are trees in India or not.
I hope people won’t bombard me for posting here because I know you guys sort of have an anti-teen rule, but I sat for that AP this year and I did answer that question. In defense of all the crazy answers, I’ll just say that it was definitely the hardest question of the test and most of had been testing everyday of the week, generally writing 2-3 essays for each test, and a lot of people had two tests on one day. I’d say we were all far too exhausted to care about giving accurate portrayals of India. From what I can recall, I went along the route of his isolation from the rest of the family, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who went on the poor, exotic Indian route. I wouldn’t have worried that the grader taking off points for generalization because most teachers have similarly limited ideas about India. My AP Eng teacher this year is a 30-year veteran of the AP program and a very smart, intellectual woman, but the only time she dealt with India (or any non-Western cultures for that matter) was when we watched Water, and she held that up as the COMPLETE truth about widows in India, adding in some Gandhian philosophy for good measure. If the best teachers use the sati-elephants-Gandhi-poor shorthand for India, I highly doubt you can expect students to do any better.
No- she is not. She is a certified moron if she uses Water as the basis for her understanding of India. Sort of like using Linda Lovelace as the typical American woman.
I really feel sorry for the kids who have such teachers. At least in my school ( poor as it was), we did not learn about American Culture – we stuck to the facts like the “Boston Tea Party”.
Lea:
Respect.
Thanks for commenting. It’s good to hear the students’ POV on this.
I concur. One of the few truly indian Authors is “R K Narayan”. But I daresay reading Malgudi Days wont really make such sense to an American student. Not that Anita Desai makes much better sense. But seriously, why would anyone prescribe Anita Desai- what happened to Maugham /Chesterton and of course the Bard. Not good enough ? Would appreciate if someone could shed some light on English classes in American High schools.
i disagree. as amardeep indicated, the passage is a lead-up to some climax. i think desai demonstrated great skill in setting the mood. she seems to be a good writer to me. (and at least this review has high regard for her craft). does she represent india? no. but then i do not believe anyone can. a writer speaks of the world around her. it may not represent the truth for the multitudes, but her view is her truth. to me, a novel is an insight into another’s soul. i read novels for pleasure and for conversation with an unknown person. one may even get insight into the heart and the mind of that Indian, but it is unwise to expect that insight to stretch across the billion and fluff.
regarding your proposition of maugham/chesterton/shekharpearey repping india – ?? – where did that come from machang. unless you regard maugham’s lotus eaters or the englishman’s desi bride + inlaws from hell as representative of india. 😉
I have read R. K. Narayan, and found his writing really quite boring and insipid.
“Not good enough”? What is that supposed to mean? That only the classics are worth reading? Anita Desai is no slouch. She is one of the early examples of modern Indian writing in English, and was even a professor of humanities at MIT (and is currently emeritus there).
Lea – teens are welcome here.
My first thought on skimming that excerpt was, ‘how tedious’. Why or why can’t I like some of the current desi favorites? Can’t stand Arhundhati, can’t stand Lahiri, oh, why or why can’t I like one of these writers? Oh, well. There’s plenty to read out there. Glad I wasn’t an English major. More fun to read around, whatever you want, I think. Autodidacticness, which is a word I just made up.
However, the mood of the scene is interesting. I imagine it hot, sticky, humid and insect-y. As an introvert, I feel sympathy with Arun, who I imagine is also an introvert. Introverts love to ‘plead work’. I’d hate to spend a day at the beach with someone who has radiantly ‘lipstick’ smiles, myself, probably with flecks of the reddish stuff on their teeth. Yuck.
Another quick thought – were the kids trying to be, in a perverted way, multicultural? Do they feel they must comment on ‘cultures’ in a dim, dull, ‘why does college cost so damn much’ university-adminstrator approved way and just got it horribly wrong? Side-effect of hyphenations, South-Asian lit, this lit and that lit, etc?
Just brainstorming!
Thanks for all of the interesting comments on this piece (and thanks for saying it is interesting). I am especially glad to hear from the student who took this exam. Yes, it was the hardest question because it asked for close reading (several students wrote comments such as Anita Desai? Haven’t you heard of Melville, Whitman, Steinbeck–feel free to insert any white male author here–and I am not being redctive; students really only ever wrote a white male at the end of that phrase. No student was asking me What about Woolf? Byatt? Austen?) and was a passage no student had encountered, I am guessing. Great to hear from someone who had to suffer on the other end of pink book!
Yes, I heard comments like the above all spring when I taught a course to students with whom I went to India in December. Many of them wanted to solve all of India’s problems in five pages. They made sweeping generalizations about Indian women, Indian history with a capital H, and India’s place in the system of global capitalism. I can only hope that they walked away from the course with a better sense of how not to generalize, even though they had seen the country “with their own [very filtered] eyes.”
When I brought up the possibilities for the Freudian reading of the passage, I was poo-pooed by most of my table of readers who didn’t want to go down that path. I felt like the dirty girl who wanted to talk sex in a conference center surrounded by fluorescent lighting. But I think that is a legitimate reading of this short passage, and the one student who wrote such a reading did in fact get an excellent score on the essay. So a score of 5 would certainly be in your future!
And yes, there were many gestures at being multicultural, the throw any idea of India I have at the paper and see if something sticks (which is a good tactic since in fact we are to reward students for what they do well as opposed to penalizing them for what they don’t). I wrote the post because I was just so shocked at the rampant nature of the horribly wrong and often mean-spirited ways they spoke of Arun just from that one passage. He doesn’t like the woods. That doesn’t need to be because he is Indian, but by pointing that out, the question writers certainly opened a door and invited that kind of vitriol in.
Again, thanks for reading the post!
I found it to be a difficult question placed against a weak passage. There’s little to indicate, from this excerpt alone, that Arun is an exchange student — in fact, the first sentences, “It was Saturday. Arun could not plead work.” seem to contradict the very idea of student life, e.g. of course Arun could plead work on a Saturday; if he’s a student, he’s got loads of homework to get done before the following Monday.
Even if we trust the prompt and follow the idea that Arun is an exchange student and we are to analyze his experience, there is little — if nothing — in the excerpt dealing with his reaction to a “foreign land.” Yet that’s what the prompt asks us to uncover, and that’s what the majority of the answers Colleen read dealt with, which is probably why so many of them filled-in-the-blanks with gross generalizations about India.
What would have happened if someone wrote:
This excerpt has less to do with Arun’s experience as “stranger in America” and much more to do with his discomfort in the natural world. The thesis of the excerpt is the sentence “Why must people live in the vicinity of such benighted wilderness and become a part of it?” which has little to do with culture, either Indian or American. It can be assumed, perhaps, that Arun-as-student prefers the tidy world of books and homework and crisp papers; the safe world of the mind as opposed to the wilderness of reality — but even this says little about his experience as an exchange student. One would have to theorize that Arun dislikes “wilderness” as much in India as he does in America.
Colleen, how would you have scored an answer like that? ^__^
(Also — where does the excerpt indicate that Melanie has an eating disorder? All I’m reading is “she’s wearing a big shirt over a swimsuit.”)
I think this is an interesting post, especially since I just took the exam. There was laughter in my head because I was imagining how my fellow classmates would pronounce the names. I also assumed that many of us would put b.s. answers (we’re all seniors, it was way too hot, just wanted to get it all over with!). If I recall, I believe I wrote something about how Arun felt uncomfortable around the girl because of the exchange student and gender factors. Something along those lines at least. Others wrote about the increasing sexual tension between the two. Yeah, go figure
Need some more clarity. Anita Desai is an excellent author and I have read several of her books and yes I have read this particulare book. I was not bagging her. Using literature to understand the culture of another country is ridiculous. Literature makes sense only if one has context not the other way around. Literature is a very poor subsitute – at least to a high school student. If you want to understand culture – go and live there or wherever. Tom Sawyer is hardly representative of American Teenagers and if indian students were to asked to analyze American teenagers based on Mark Twain’s books I daresay that the result will not be too different. If Tom Sawyer is 19th century, imagine doing the same thing with “Friends” – does it accurately reflect life in NYC for 20 year olds. Hardly.
Students are not to be blamed. Dumb teachers are. I was not saying that Chesterton or Maugham or BArd would represent India – I said that they are good authors and probably not too far out of line with the cultural background of the American students. Anita Desai is to be read for her English not for her social cultural stories. Will Jim Corbett make any sense to an American student – Nope. Context matters.
29 · melbourne desi said
Well to some degree it does. It’s really all about 6 people in their late 20’s who work, hang out, and attempt to solve the mysteries of their respective love lives. I think literature tells us something about society in that time period (also depending on location). But then again when writers write, they tend to put their own spin on things.
Blue, I would have fallen off my seat to get something with close to that kind of interesting insight. If I read the phrase “stranger in a strange land” one more time, I would have stood up and screamed.
The rumor mill told me she has an eating disorder, but I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. And you are right, the prompt itself set kids up to write right into the world of generalizations.
Great to see another student who took the exam on here!
exactly. Spin is the key word. Friends ignores the black and the hispanic population. To someone who has no clue about America, Friends provide a one-dimensional view of the world. And literature provides an insight but only if one already has the context to understand.
I am surprised that folks are criticizing the students. Remember they are in their mid teens. And the quality of students is often a function of their teachers. Dumb teachers == Dumber students.
A contextual question : Where are the students from ? private school / rich public school / poor private school ?
anita desai is very good but was there a reason to choose her over others.
I can understand why one might find it so. eg. Maurice Tate and his impact on the Ashes series is relevant to appreciate Swami and Friends.
I went (graduated this year) to a well-off public school in the Chicago suburbs, and I have had the pleasure of having some incredible teachers in my time there, including my AP Eng teacher. It isn’t that she isn’t aware of the fact that there is more to India than Water, rather that she doesn’t have the time to delve into the details (maybe doesn’t fully understand them herself), so she uses generalizations, hoping they’ll suffice for now. You can’t blame her for not knowing these things, MOST people in the world don’t know much about things beyond their own little world, so it’s up to individual students to make that discovery. And they probably have, but a timed, stressful AP test in not the way to gauge their understanding of other cultures. Most students just want to get the most points they can and get it over with.
32 · melbourne desi said
Definitely. I think Friends portrays life in NYC fairly well (coffee shop hangouts, incorporating NYU, etc.) but it definitely caters to a selective population. What you say is true but I think it applies for many shows. I mean if Uncle Ji in Delhi constantly watches Nanny 911 he may never want to raise kids in America :). Same thing can be applied in America. Like many Americans look at India as a dirty, smelly place (which is true in many parts). But there’s also a crapload of beauty as well. DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING THE MEDIA SAYS! lol
Lea said : “Most students just want to get the most points they can and get it over with.” Most kids I knew just wanted to get the hell outta there! Funny story…last year some student had the ingenius idea to create a mask. Using what? The materials in front of him: The AP Lit test. haha
Of course one should. She is a teacher – teaching the wrong thing is not acceptable. Saying I dont know is quite different from using generalizations to teach the wrong thing. Yes – I agree that self learning is the way to go but not with a teacher like the one you have described. Although I admire your defence of your teacher, this sort of ignorance is not defensible. Let me turn this around. If a teacher in India taught that “all american women are whores” – would you accept / defend it?
As the commies would say – time for a reeducation class 🙂
All I can say is, this makes me glad that I only have to deal with the AP Statistics and IB Mathematical Studies SL exams.
A few writers are exceptions, but fiction is not the way to learn about a different place or time: non-fiction is. As melbourne desi said, context matters. When people read fiction, they only remember the weird/exotic, and forget the commonalities.
Also no one is going to start respecting South Asian people or culture because they read a book about South Asia. People only respect strength and success. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Toyota has done more for the Japanese image in the USA than Murakami and Mishima combined.
Thirdly, I believe literature is the most beautiful thing there is, and the greatest achievement of mankind. But I have generally been disappointed in english majors. I wish literature classes would be the hardest to get into, because it is so rare to find a person who can think originally about a book, or write a really good one. But that does not seem to be the case.
it’s sad that these students are so ignorant but i am grateful that they didn’t have to disect “The Namesake” by Lahiri. She’s a good writer but it’s so obvious that she’s deeply ashamed of her parents.
also, anita desai’s work is so hard to comprehend. i really struggle with it and i did english literature a-level at a good school here in london.
Literature was a compulsory subject in our school- Dutch as well as English lit for everybody. For those people who took French and German they had to take Literature in those respective languages as well. Since I took Latin I had to read Ovidius. There were a lot of different kinds of Dutch books on our reading list, and some were by Dutch-born authors of Indonesian or Middle Eastern ancestry. Our exam setup was not similar to this ‘AP level exam’ (not sure what that is – is it something national?), we had to learn poetry and write an essay comparing books, as well partake in an oral exam. I wouldn’t be surprised though if some people’s answers to excerpts by foreign ancestry authors came out in a similar way. For English I know some read Maya Angelou’s ‘I know why the caged bird sings’ and I doubt most of them grasped it’s context!
I taught high school for eight years, and it was the hardest job I ever had or will ever have. My posting had no intention of undoing the work they do, because in all honesty the level of work is often inhumane. I could have stood in front of my class all day and attempted to help them see the complexity of issues of nationality, gender, race, sexuality, etc., but that does not mean they all would have heard me. As a teacher, one is competing with too many outside forces to list. Add to the formula the mandatory one day workshop ramming a farcical approach to multiculturalism down our throats, the lack of money to travel and actually see the world, and a class load of 130 students a day (and their parents calling you all the time), and you have a person who is trying to do one’s best and maybe doesn’t always succeed. I am guessing Water was not presented as representative of all Indian women, and frankly, I am impressed by a teacher who would even show that in high school. That is pretty daring for a lot of reasons. And requires a lot of discussion which she probably didn’t have time to have. Teachers have such an important job, and most of them I have met (including my husband) are always trying to do the right thing. I think the problem of generalization runs a lot deeper than them.
And about the class issue. I could tell by school codes if kids were from the same school (but didn’t know even the name of the school). It was always clear what class the school was by things such as length of essay, quality of analysis, and, for some weird reason, handwriting. This may been one of the hardest parts of the grading for me. I know intellectually there is a great disparity in education (thank to writers such as Kozol), but to see it on paper made my heart go out to the kids who would end up with a one on the exam. I wanted to shout to them that that grade doesn’t define them, to not be disheartened. It is just a number, just a test.
Besides, I got a 3 and I think I turned out ok when it comes to Lit.
Colleen,
Why is it your job to teach about sexuality, gender, and race, and other sorts of ideology, in an AP English class? Is that the current fashion among teachers? Serious question, I’m not trying to be snarky. Aren’t there better places for that sort of thing to be taught? (I hear a lot of complaints from supervisor/boss types about the level of written communication of students right out of school. They have to be re-trained to communicate effectively. I, as a bad writer, have no reason to look-down, however……)
We had Social Studies and History to a certain extent to teach us about those things – Lit/English and Dutch class just taught us how to read and interpret texts.
29 · melbourne desi said
agreed on all points. thanks for clarifying.
anjum , why in the world would you think jhumpa is ashamed of her parents????
MD, I think the texts present all of those issues, and a responsible teacher is going to teach students to read with a critical lens, which often means discussing those sorts of content. It is fun and challenging. I can’t imagine teaching a text and not thinking about the ways ideology works in it. I think 90% of people never read Shakespeare once they leave high school, so the act of learning how to read a text is more valuable, at least to me, than the plot, etc. Reading for ideology (and I am using this term very loosely) is a crucial skill that I think many people are lacking. That being said, this passage about Arun is short. They were to write about Arun’s experience, possibly focusing on how “speech and point of view” work in the passage. As a reader, I find the tension between the women and the feminization of Arun to be the most interesting elements of this short passage.
I am kind of regretting my comments from yesterday night. The world seems so much clearer at 2 in the morning after a long day. I am sure there are many smart ones out there. Also maybe I am just jealous cos I never got to study lit. texts formally 😉 .
I would comment, but I can plead work.
I skimmed the post and many of the comments initially under the impression that these were Indian students writing the AP English exam from India, to test out of having to take 1st year English in US universities that they hoped to join.
I thought the Indian students were telling their American graders that India really did have trees, and I thought maybe that was an attempt at sarcasm that I would cheer them for. And I was struck – indeed, I marveled, at the creativity of the Indian high-schooler who invoked the cherry-sundae metaphor. So much for Reading Comprehension.
But I congratulate whoever came up with the phrase ‘cultural electrocution’. I think I might use it somewhere myself.