The Second Krabappel – or – What is Composition?

The Second Krabappel – or – What is Composition?

[after class the next day]

Bartocrates: You emailed my parents without telling me?  

Ms. Krabappel: Yes?

B: I feel violated.

K: I’m supporting you, it’s part of my job.  You and I talked about the work you hadn’t done.  I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.

B: You’re talking about my grade?

K: Yes, it’s currently an F.  You haven’t turned in any of the essays I have assigned.  Even 3 of the in-class ones.  What were you doing during those class periods?

B: Uh, so, you know those Wikipedia rabbit holes I was telling you about?  

K: Well, as interesting as I’m sure they are, and, I will admit after our last dialogue, it sounds like you’ve learned a lot, and I may consider implementing some of that into my curriculum 3 years from now (I’ve already completed photocopies of my handouts for the next 2 years, I’m sure you understand), for now, I need you to complete some of your work.  The school says I need to give you at least a 50, which feels unfair, but here we are.  The school also requires me to allow you to make up this work, even though we’ve moved on from it and it feels really transactional at this point.

B: I hear you – I’m not really a fan of transactional learning either.  I’m really okay with not writing those essays, you know, as we said a few years ago, I’ll just take the L on those Ms. K.  But honestly, even aside from grades, I don’t understand why you want us to write essays in the first place.

K: Oh God this isn’t one of those “but when will we use this in the real world?” conversations is it?  I can’t tolerate another one. Believe it or not there is more to adult life than “doing your taxes,” and also, you can figure that out on your own.  Or have AI do it for you.  I really don’t care.  But what I do care about is teaching you how to write.  Yes, you will use that in the real world.  Or at least what you learn from doing it.

B: Okay so my argument is about “the real world,” but not in that way.  I actually get you – I find it tedious when my classmates say that type of stuff too.  I agree that there’s more to learning than preparation for the most mundane aspects of adult life.  And I don’t really like AI any more than you (even if I use it in a pinch when I know I haven’t done my work and there are just too many immediate negative – err – transactional consequences for me to ignore it).  Though I do think both the “taxes” and the AI thing point to something about the “real world” that I do care about.

K: And that is?

B: I’m not ready to share yet.  First I want to hear more from you.  Why do you want us to write essays?  I mean really?  Stop guessing why you think I don’t want to write them and replying to that.  Just tell me what you think is valuable about those essays I didn’t write.

K: I think the answer is pretty simple. Actually there are a lot of why’s but they’re all pretty similar in structure.  Our state’s writing standards value your ability to write essays.  The Common Core does as well.  The AP exam, as you know, provides you with two hours of time to write three essays.  It’s pretty rare that state, federal and AP agree on anything quite as simple and straightforward as this, but ultimately, those are their goals.  And it’s my job to implement them.

B: Fair enough I suppose.  I’m not asking you to get fired.  But I do want to know how you feel about those mandates, beyond just that they exist.  So for instance, why do you think those 3 governing authorities all want us to write essays.  What is valuable about an essay?  

K: There’s a trap here I know.  You’re leading me towards the “back in the day assessment books had 5 pages in them, so teachers began teaching 5 paragraph essays as a means to fill those books, but ultimately they’re just academic artifacts.”  But I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

B: There you go again anticipating my position.  I just asked you a question.  What’s valuable about an essay?

K: Fine, I’ll play your game.  One thing I’d say – not the only thing but one thing – is that essays are compositions.  The class you’re taking is called AP English Literature and Composition.  If you do not like writing, no one made you take this course.  

B: So writing and composition, they are pretty well connected in your mind, and in your curriculum.

K: For the purpose of this class, they’re one and the same.  

B: They are?  But we do things other than writing in class – worksheets, exit slips, Google forms – why?

K: I’ll tweak that a little bit.  Essay writing is, I think, the endpoint of the composition process.  Before that, there’s brainstorming, thesis construction, collection of evidence, outlining, drafting – at the end of all of that, you have an essay.

B: I’m confused though.  Where do my marginal drawings in Tedious Times come in?

K: You’re right you’re right – annotation should be in there too.  Probably right before brainstorming.  Or maybe during collection of evidence, if and when any of you actually re-read the books about which you’re writing essays, as I always advise you to do.

B: Writing is the end-point of composition, you’re saying.  Very Aristotleian of you I think.  

K: Thank you?  I think?

B: If writing is the end point of composition, though, I think we still need to define “composition” in the first place, no?

K: Composition.  Since I now know you’re a fan of Latin, let’s start there.  Com = together, connecting, I think from cum, preposition with the ablative meaning “with” (not to be confused with cum the conjunction, inviting all those subjunctive constructions); “position” – from pono ponere posui positus, meaning “to put or place.”  A composition is the putting together of something.  In this case, of an argument about literature.  About books, poems, plays — or — if you like, also television, film, music, even video games, I suppose social media too.  This is just for the sake of argument you understand.  I’m still not sure I really agree with what you said in our last dialogue but we’ll bracket that. 

B: Okay, so “composition” is putting together arguments about literature (concerns about definition noted), and the end point of that process is essay-writing.

K: Yes, I think we can all agree at least on that.

B: In fact I know I said before that “etymology isn’t argument,” but in this case, I’m willing to go with your parsing of “composition” as involving cum and ponere.  What I am not fully comfortable with, though, is this “essay” part.  It seems to come in at the end – composition being what it is, what does an essay have to do with that?

K: See, I knew you’d come back to that “5 page test booklet” thing.  It always felt simplistic to me.  Sure, maybe it’s true – I don’t really know – maybe 150-200 years ago, when modern schools started, there was a very pre-industrial purpose that got smuggled into learning goals we still have not fully set on their own logical bases.  Maybe.  Again, I’m willing to concede that for the sake of argument at least.  But essay-writing is a much longer tradition, going back hundreds of years, even thousands.  Writing is a time-honored form of composition.

B: I want to emphasize a word you just spoke – “a.”  It is a form of composition, but there are other forms?

K: Of course.  This feels similar to our other conversation.  We have artistic composition, musical composition, photographic composition.  I think all of those are valuable forms of culture.  But the one we’re here for is written composition.

B: Can I add another to your list?

K: I’m suspicious but okay.

B: Oral composition.  Remember that Homeric Question rabbit-hole?

K: Oral composition – sure.  So, in the pre-literate period, the Homeric poet(s), they’d memorize and transmit their compositions without reading or writing.  Griots, shamans, they do it too.  Did you see Sinners?  I found that movie fascinating, if a bit gory.

B: I did enjoy it – but – “memorize” is not the right word for what Homeric bards or Sammy Moore.  Remember that scene in the car when they perform?  That song Sammy sings is brand new for the occasion, even if the chords were familiar.  And those Homeric poets too – they didn’t craft their stories word by word, and then remember them later.  In fact I want to do a bit of etymology of my own.  Re-member.  Re meaning “again or back,” “member” meaning a component (oh look – a component – also related to “composition” – just from the infinitive stem ponere instead of the participial positus).  To remember something is to put it back together.  To re-compose let’s say.  

K: I think that all checks out, but remembering again that etymology doesn’t ever prove anything.  Sometimes it just turns into games with words.

B: “Games with words” – great phrase.  In fact, that’s what those Homeric poets were doing.  Playing games with words.  They didn’t “memorize” their entire poems, they developed libraries of components – words, phrases, even short stories that were memorized.  Then they put them together in performance.  The building blocks weren’t expected to come together in the same way every time.  The art of the poet was the creative re-combining.  Re-membering.  Lord describes those Serbian bards as being able not only to repeat long poems from memory, but also making subtle or large additions to each other’s poems in a very extemporaneous way.

K: It sounds like these bards were pretty good at brainstorming and outlining.  If we could teach them how to write, I bet they would excel at essay writing.

B: Well, anthropologists actually think the opposite (though it seems like it’s more complicated than that too).  They think that the lack of reading/writing skill is what allowed their minds to combine and re-combine, to remember, in this way.  It created pressure that encouraged oral tradition to develop.  Tradition – handing down – the passing along of information through this process of recombination and expansion.  A lot of people think it was just generation-to-generation exact memory copies.  There were some settings that worked like this, but Homer was not one of them, at least not initially.

K: So, they engaged in oral composition because they did not have writing.

B: Partially yes.  Though there are again hybrid moments.  Where writing or print culture intersect with oral composition.  It’s not black or white.

K: Well however you want to describe it, I want to push back myself.  

B: Go ahead.

K: Oral composition is a form of creative, expressive composition, like fiction, music, poetry – what we’re here to do is the analysis of literature.  Oral composition is a beautiful tradition, or set of traditions, and I do thank you for clarifying that it’s not only about memorization in our sense.  But what we’re here to do, essay writing, that’s different because it analyzes “texts” (it still pains me to use that word – I need to leave it in quotation marks if it’s all the same to you).

B: We’re talking; quotation marks are written.  But I do hear the way you’re changing your tone of voice when you say the word, your hesitation, the skepticism that it implies.  But I’ll let that be.  Texts.  Try to say it without that hesitation, you can do that too. 

K: We’re here to analyze texts.  Essay writing is how we do that.  AP Literature and Composition is about written analysis of – texts.  See, I did it with a dash instead.  I’m easing into it.

B: I need to tell you something else though.  Oral composition absolutely engages in analysis and interpretation.  So do those other forms of composition by the way.  Like when someone performs a jazz standard, do we not call that an “interpretation”?

K :Now who’s using quotation marks.  I can hear your hesitation from here.

B: Not hesitation, just mentioning the word rather than using it.  A jazz performance interprets the standard.  It emphasizes certain features, builds new meaning.  Houston Baker Junior says the same thing about the blues (like in Sinners).  They get re-interpreted each time they are performed.  New meaning is made.  Is this not what an essay does – makes “meaning” – think about Q3 – “meaning of the work as a whole.”

K: A student who understands what you just said, it’s a shame you won’t just write the essays we’re here to discuss.

B: Ad hominem!  

K: Fair enough, continue.

B: I think my point is clear enough.  There are lots of forms of composition and they all engage in the act of interpreattion, analysis, meaning-making, call if what you will.

K: Okay I’m just going to say it – I don’t think John Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” is doing the same thing as a student writing an essay in my class.  He’s taking Julie Andrews’ performance and offering his own, albeit with syncopation, irony, and re-appropriative energy that I can quite appreciate.  A student writing an essay is taking something in one form – a novel, say – and writing about it in a different form – as an essay.

B: But Julie Andrews and John Coltrane are also creating different “things” – a word you asked me not to use before.  Julie Andrews is performing a solo in a musical drama – with words.  John Coltrane is recording a track on a jazz album – without words.  

K: But they’re both music.  Whereas when AP Guest Lecturer Earl Brooks (he was at the Lang reading last summer) writes Rhetoric and Black Music, he is doing something different from both Coltrane and Andrews.  He is writing about their performances.  It’s that “about” that’s important.  This class involves composition that is about literature.  It’s not a creative writing class either.  I love creative writing – but it’s not what the AP Exam or those state standards we were talking about are “about.”

B: I see what you did there.  So, about-ness, that feels important?

K: Yes, even if it sounds vaguely Heideggerian.  Gegenständlichkeit. 

B: Godblessyou.  One way we can talk about “about-ness” is to talk about a “meta-language.”  If the original text is written in a language, an act of interpretation is composed in a meta-language.  So Coltrane’s is the language of Jazz, Brooks’ is the meta-language of interpretation.

K: Sure, that works.  What we’re here to do is engage in meta-language work.  And I think it has value.

B: There you go again supposing I have some other belief.  Yes, I think meta-language work has value.  But what really makes a meta- language meta?  Coltrane interpreting Andrews – could we not say that Andrews’ is in the language of musical theatre, and Coltrane’s is the meta-language of jazz?  “Meta” as a prefix in Greek means both “about” and also “after.”  That’s not a coincidence.

K: Prepositions mean everything in every language, haven’t you noticed that by now?  They’re not usually a good basis for argument.

B: Well then let me ask you – what’s the difference between Coltranee’s meta-language of Jazz and Brooks’ meta-langauge of wriitng?

K: One is a performative response, the other is analytical.

B: Now it seems like you’re explaining the obscure by the more obscure.  Remember in Gatsby?

K: Chapter 3?

B: You English teachers are super weird about Gatsby.  Yes, Chapter 3, how coudl you have known that?  “A Jazz History of the World.”

K: That’s a metaphor – it’s not a literal history, it’s a title for a piece – yes, even a “composition” that riffs on the idea, but we can see the difference between metaphorical and literal histories.

B: I want to know how you decided what was “literal.”  Oh look at that there – “Litera” appears again.  (Written) letters.  Is that the difference?

K: It’s not the difference but it is part of it.  I think the most important difference is that literary analysis language centers a particular kind of reading that jazz or blues re-performance, or Homeric verifying doesn’t.  It’s precisely because it’s not “creative” in any conventional way that it can explore texts in a more abstract, in-depth way.  Is it a confidence that this is the form of interpretation most English Literature academics use?  

B: I think that’s also more than a coincidence, but not in a good way.  Let’s try this – You know, I watched Brooks’ lecture on Youtube.  He did more than speak about Coltrane, he played excerpts.  I thought it was pretty cool.  He had a whole band there.  Why do you think he did that?

K: I think it made it more engaging, also all the adults there got one free drink.  It was more of an evening thing, you know?

B: He actually engaged in four distinct activities in that lecture – he read from a manuscript, he at times extemporized, he played music from a score, and also, at times, extemporized on that.

K: Yes, it was a great talk and performance, and I enjoyed the free glass of wine.

B: I think it illustrates a fundamental issue with interpretation, analysis, about-ness.  There is no one privileged “meta-language.”  When we talk about “essays” I think we forget that.  Essays are one among any number of ways to respond to a text.

K: They also happen to be the way the AP exam expects you to respond.  You have to write 3 on-demand essays.

B: But interestingly, if we were an IB school, they’d also have an oral component.  And a prepared essay component.  That’s 3 ways of responding, 3 meta languages if you want.  

K: I see what you’re saying there and of course, our state standards make room for those forms of writing as well, even if the AP doesn’t.  But I don’t think that’s what you’re really getting after is it?

B: No, you’re right.  Honestly I’m more concerned about my (yes, sometimes obscene) margin drawings.  You’re not taking them seriously.  I deserve more credit.  Didn’t you see that little key I drew for you in the front cover too?  It’s not like I just put a question-mark or a star at random places.  There is a lot there!  And yet I have an F.

K: Why don’t you just translate them into an essay and we both will have what we want?  If they’re so good you should be able to rewrite the in English.  You don’t believe in the Spark-Worph hypothesis do you young man?

B: Why should I have to translate?  You know what too, translate. Latin – to bring across – from trans-, cross, and fero ferre, tuli latus, that most famous irregular verb.  To bring across.  And metaphor – from Greek meta– (also across), and phero – to bring.  Also irregular in Greek.  They’re both about bringing across.  But why?  Why do I need to “bring them across?”  If I told you they were a metaphor for an essay, you’d roll your eyes, but you think it’s reasonable to ask me to translate them, which comes to the same thing?

K: Like I said before – we’re here to write in an analytical meta-language about texts written in creative languages.  I am not denying the richness of creative language.  I am simple saying it’s something different from analytical language, even if it’s a continuum like you’re describing.

B: But again we come back to why this one language?  What’s so special about it?  You know what, this reminds me of another rabbit-hole – WVO Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”  He argues that when we select one privileged sort of field – for him it’s “logical statements” vs. “empirical ones,” in fact, the distinction always collapses.  I think something similar is happening here.

K: You lost me.

B: Every text can be seen both as its own language and as a meta-language.  Every text is its own thing, and also in dialogue with something (usually lots of things) that came before it.  That it came “after.”  That it is, in some sense “about.”  It’s just in different senses.  Donald Davidson “in the very idea of a conceptual scheme” makes an argument that helps here too.

K: That feels like a strained analogy. You can see the difference between an analytical essay and a work of art that responds to another work of art, right?

B: I can, but I do not understand exactly why it’s so important.  It feels to me like an artifact of testing and measurement.

K:that’s not necessarily wrong: If the AP exam asked people to write a poem in response to a poem, how would they grade it?

B: So the particular meta-language we’re focused on in this course is one that’s relatively easy to assess.  But also, there are performance AP exams – the studio art and also music courses require students to produce work that is creative in nature, and they do evaluate it.

K: fair enough.  But that doesn’t mean they’re not usefully distinguished as two types of critical enterprises. 

B: I’m enough of a pragmatist to recognize that this particular meta-language, if it can be shown to serve a purpose in existing, can perhaps be allowed to be called special.  But I do wonder whether the demands of standardized testing are actually important enough to justify this distinction.  Actually, this reminds me of something else from our other discussion.

K: Serbians again?

B: Nope, Nigerians.  Or their West African ancestors, and their descendants (of the African diaspora).  Gates spends a lot of time on something that it really took me a lot of time to understand.  It’s something he gestures at in his intro.  He talks about how his father, who as far as I know was not an English major, and who wanted Gates to be a doctor, was always good at “talking about talking.”  And he goes on to say that his father, in his perception, is not alone in this.  He has seen this kind of talking about talking across his life – in barber shops, pool halls, at picnics, in church – everywhere he sees as a center of Black culture.

K: Oh wait one time I read an article about Their Eyes were Watching God—

B: He’s written about that book, and in this text, and its use of, well, language and meta-language in one book.  Janie’s AAVE dialogue vs. the narrator’s SAE narration.

K: That’s proof though, it’s proof of the value of the meta-language, and also of SAE.  It’s proof that our students can and should be challenged to engage in both. I think Zora Neale Hurston implies the same thing in “How it Feels to be Colored Me.”

B: Hold on though, again, you’re answering arguments I didn’t make.  Back to Gates’ father and all those other non-academic folks who are good at talking about talking.  Gates theorizes this into his concept of “signifyin(g).”  Roughly, and really simplistically, it comes to this: the texts in the Black tradition contain talking and also talking about talking, and outsiders often miss this.  Language and meta-language run together.  Performance and analysis too.  Gates argues that performance texts contain a great deal of interpretive strength.  They read and re-read texts that come before them, even if they don’t make their meta-language specific.

K: But if a student wrote like a barbershop conversation on the AP exam, they’d…

B: Really, hold on to that though.  Whatever AP readers would perceive of that choice, we as intellectuals can recognize the clarity in his argument.  To bring it back to the other example (and Brooks talks about this in his essay about Coltrane), Coltrane’s performance of “My Favorite Things” contains a subtle critique of the culture that produced The Sound of Music, and it’s evident to anyone who has been trained in that tradition.  To use Gates’ terms, Coltrane signifies upon Andrews.

K: Okay so something I’m thinking then is, students who were raised in that tradition, they’re likely to know how to do what I need them to do already – write in a meta-language.

B: But also, they already know how to use language and metalanguage simultaneously.  Why insist on the decoupling?  Again I’m reminded of Baldwin’s words – “A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white.”  I know he’s talking about race there, but he’s talking about something else too I think.  Our insistence on separating culturally embedded practices from this allegedly neutral academic meta-language.  And what a destructive force it can be – especially (but not only when) it’s doubling down on racial hierarchy.

K: But like I said before, they clearly can do it.

B: Yes, students who have been raised to code-switch definitely know how to do it.  What I’m asking is why you’re asking them to do something that you’re not asking students for whom the academic meta-language is more culturally aligned with their upbringing to do.  

K: It’s not me, it’s the AP Exam.  And I’m here to help those students.  They stand to benefit from high AP Scores, good grades, and so on. And that’s partially because that particular meta language is more universal and therefore more effective than the language of jazz, say, or signifying more generally. The decoupling helps render conclusions in an abstract way that performed signifying criticism can’t do.

B: Fair enough – and hold that thought again because I’m not totally against it.  But I want to make sure we agree on something – the AP Exam’s use of one particular meta-language that sees itself as “the” meta-language is problematic, and seems to ignore the wealth of other possible meta-languages – languages of interpretation, especially languages that also appear “creative.”  For some reason it draws a very firm distinction between creative and analytical writing.

K: So I think what you’re saying is that the AP’s particular type of language being privileged as “composition” is similar to the other error you pointed out about “literature” – it takes one particular class of texts (in the former case, analytical, argumentative ones, in the latter, one particular kind of written fictional text) and centers them without a lot of motivation other than “this is how the academy does it” when in fact, the academy (at least as manifested through Lord, Parry, Gates, and Brooks) has problematized all of these distinctions.  

B: Yes, High School English teachers become the tail wagging the dog, fighting the last war, pick your metaphor/translation.  But I will now concede something for the sake of argument: the AP Exam, problematic as it is, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  I do think it’s necessary to help students navigate that reality.

K:  But?  There’s clearly a “but” here.  

B: Just because the AP has centered one particular form of composition does not mean we need to.  Why can’t composition take on all the forms we’ve been discussing, just like literature can, or at least, as you’ve conceded they can?

K: So you’re not saying no essays.

B: Not necessarily no essays, especially if you think test prep is important.  But I want to talk about something else – another context I’ve learned a lot about meta-language.  Did you know I’m on the debate team?

K: No but that makes a TON of sense given your overall contrariness and arrogance.

B: Ad hominem again.  Well the year before I started debate, I got very low grades on the essays I turned in.  The year after, again, at least when I did turn them in, I performed vastly better.  What’s strange about that is, it had nothing to do with the worksheets my teachers gave me, worksheets I still didn’t do.

K:  What do you think accounts for the change?

B: I learned how to argue through debate.  Even though it’s conducted in a super arcane meta-language that I never write down.  Then I wrote essays the way teachers wanted me to but used that skill and I did great.

K: So why do I need to make room for students’ other meta-languages if you worked that out for yourself?

B: I don’t think there’s one formula for accessing other languages of criticism.  I think making space for some might be more consequential than making room for others.  Like me and the other (mostly white) kids on the debate team, as you’ve noticed, we don’t lack for academic confidence.  But that might also have to do with the logical and cultural similarity between the language and debate and the language of English class.  The point I was making was about oral vs. written.

K: But you think it’s different in other situations?

B: I do.  Let’s talk about kids in the Louder than a Bomb club.  The metalanguage contained in slam poetry, I am not sure, given the other cultural differences and yes, the culture of anti-Blackenss that exists in the US, that those students are encouraged or cared for in making the same translation as I have been from Debate.  

K: I think that’s fair but those kids don’t want to be coddled any more than you do.  I want to maintain a high standard.

B: There you go again with “high” and “low” language.  What’s “higher” about the AP’s standard?  What’s higher or more meta- about Debate than Louder than a Bomb?  Be honest, a part of you is thinking it is.  We just agreed they were all culturally specific in ways not always acknowledged.  

K: Okay so I want them to learn a “new” standard, a standard that’s part of a beautiful tradition.  I think there is something unique about English’s meta-language.

B: I think so too but I think you all as English teachers get full of yourselves about that sometimes.  Look how we’re talking/writing now – it’s a Socratic Dialogue?

K: Oh right, and Socrates wasn’t a fan of writing.

B: No, he thought it killed ideas, but that they lived more in dialogue.

K: I think that’s an overstatement.

B: Maybe it is, but it’s another example of oral/written hybridity, and language/meta-language hybridity.  I think, making spaces for those, and removing essay-writing as the “end point“ of composition, is important.  I get that the AP exam isn’t going anywhere and so in that temporal sense anyway, essay writing as an “end-point,” but if you have room in your own classroom,, why not make room for other languages of criticism, especially ones that blend analytical and creative language, especially ones your students value, and especially ones that the culture as a whole does not accept?   Give kids more time to make the translation that I made between debate and writing, instead of insisting all their assessments happen in one meta-langauge?

K: Can you take this out of the stratosphere for me?

B: Don’t make an essay the “end point” of all your assessments – implicitly or explicitly.  Podcasts, drawings, short stories, hip-hop versifying, discussions, musical performance – stop seeing them all as “alternate forms” of which the essay is the primary manifestation.  Let test prep be test prep and have faith that students can bridge the gap, and might do more if you’re making real space for those forms of culture in your classroom.

K: I suppose that’s not the end of the world, but, how do I grade those?

B: Learn about them.  All those discourses have canons of evaluation built into them.  You’ll learn something about “composition” as you do it.

K: I again find myself wondering whether different text types have different skills, and an apprehension that I’m not going to help many students get better at ones they’ve already lived more than I have.  I am not your Debate coach, nor do I know much about Spoken Word.

B: Why not teach yourself a bit?  And again, I don’t think you need to be the expert.  Get students to discover their own culturally significant canons of judgment, and get them to reflect on those.  Let those inform their assessments – give them some chance to reflect on the similarities and differences between meta-languages they already know and the one you want AP to know.  

K: I’m seeing a lot of parallels between your arguments about “literature” and about “composition.”

B: I think the current academic testing culture of the US has separated these two aspects of one unified whole in ways that have been harmful.  Showing students their essential unity  especially in contexts involving oral and written and hybrid literature from cultures that are marginalized by that separation – I think that’s important.

K: And the AP exam?  Like you said, it’s not going anywhere.

B: At the very least, they could take a page out of IB.  I think IB’s foundational multicultural framework – rather than AP’s little 2020-era “what we stand for” (and which they’ve already backed off of) is pretty relevant here.  They explicitly recognize that different cultures can do things different ways and not necessarily be wrong.

K: What if a student goes into the AP exam and uses the wrong language on it?

B: Don’t you think they’ll be pretty clear on the difference? Most of those same students (again, not coincidentally) are pretty well versed in code-switching already.  You’re just making room for them to do it by validating both codes, not only one.

K: It isn’t lowering standards?

B: To me it’s honoring the complexity of students’ situations instead of pathologizing half of them (that’s Baldwin’s point).  I think the pathologizing is what does the damage, not the duality per se.  

K: It’s a lot to think about but I’ll try.

B: And about those drawings?  And my grade?

K: What if we met halfway and you wrote me a little artists’ statement explaining in a little more depth what you were trying to do?  Yes, in my preferred meta-langauge.

B: I think I can do that.