Tuesday 7.25 Placement Essay

This afternoon I sat in the presence of 40 freshmen-to-be as they wrote their placements essays.

Every summer there are some commonalities: anxious students and students anxious about their writing; students who are expecting some kind of graded test; students who are rightfully angry about missing a day of work; students who are pumped about school beginning; students who are unsure about their writing; etc etc.

There are certain signs that signal how we read time: the first Christmas carol played in October; Valentine's Day chocolate displays in January; the cicada calling out deeper summer; the splendid change in the color of leaves; and the college placement essay. It is a harbinger of back-to-school sales, the pageantry of college football, Labor Day cookouts.

So today, sitting among the 40 anxious writers, I too was anxious. They were writing on a new question, a question that I had developed, and so there was something oddly peculiar and "at stake" for me. First of all, my language, my shaping of language, is formulated on a page for students to "process". A writing prompt is a transaction, and you hope that it will be effective not only for each individual student, but programatically as well. You hope that it will elicit writing that will reveal each writer's abilities. You hope that they will find the prompt interesting, that it will challenge them and also open up their ability to express their thinking on papper. That you will provoke some rich thinking. You want writing that is fresh and alive, honest and intelligent. You want to create a writing task that is manageble but that will also ask something of you, the reader.

So I was sitting in a room full of people completing my "test," while at the same time, I was being tested, and my test was being tested.

I, too, felt anxious!

If the test does not work, I have failed thes 40 students, and I may have doomed another 160 to sweating over some instrument that is frustrating, ineffective, even lame.

So for the first 25 minutes, while the students grow quiet, while the oxygen in the auditorium is sucked out by the gasps of inspiration and plunging into the cold deep end of their ideas, I too am quiet, nervous, edgy, gasping for air.

And then the first confident writer steps up, slaps down his essay, and bails out of the room. A page and a half of unrevised prose hot off the presses, it's smoldering on the desk. Fuming.

Another gasp of panic sweeps the ill-lit room. How could he finish so fast, so boldly, so arrogantly? This from the remaining students and myself. Are they all rummies? Is the prompt so ridiculously easy? Am I a lummox? Hav I created something that is untranslateable?

A few more breaths, and the room returns to the scratching of pens on paper. A crude and rare sound, these days, in the era of keys clicking on keyboards, the whispered clatter of laptops, the sound of students who wait to write until they get home. A placement essay imposes a demand on each and every writer in the room, and the wonder is, every student does write an essay, a workable draft, within the ridiculously slim allotted time and the artificial conditions. Thought appears.

And so I sat there, amongst these writers, writing on my laptop, ripping off a few memos to my colleagues, returning email. I read from The History of Walking.

Anxious, hoping I would not fail them, that my prompt would not fail them. Or our program.

And sure enough, just as every end-of-summer ritual warns of the impending demise of vacation, the students lined up in front of my desk and handed in their essays, one at a time, a steady trickle, over the last twenty minutes, until there was only one writer left in the room, and she scribbled fastidiously over the remaining threee minutes and then handed in her paper.

So their placement writing and the prompt is a huge success.

At least until I read their writing, and learn if the results of their collective energy results in good writing, writing that will introduce them as writers ready to grow beyond their current talents.

Until then, I remain an anxious failure.