Written by Brian Hannon

Hello! I had the great pleasure of reading student essays from this one of the operational prompts this year, the one revolving around the concept of “secrets.” The prompt is as follows: 

“Many works of literature feature a character who holds a secret that can have broader implications for that character or other characters. For example, such secrets may create conflict, provide a source of consolation, protect characters from reality, or allow one character to manipulate other characters.

Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which an important character holds a secret that affects that character’s relationship with one or more other characters. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the effect of the character’s secret contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.”

In short, students just had to identify any form of a “secret” and discuss how it contributes to the work as a whole.

From my reading, I would say that – for the most part – students had really interesting things to say about the works that they read. I’ll briefly go over the Glows & Grows and offer my insight about the prompt and what we can do moving forward to prepare students for prompts like these.

Glows:

– Most students got the thesis point. Students had to do is identify a secret (in its many shapes or forms) and discuss how it functions in the work. If a student addresses a thesis and does not discuss how the secret “functions” in the work, however, then they wouldn’t be awarded the thesis. So, it was nice to see that students were able to identify not only the secret, but make an attempt to link its narrative function. 

– Most students read the prompt carefully and took full advantage of the little hints/pointers dropped in it. I felt like the prompt was particularly gracious (in a good way) for students because it outright gave them multiple opportunities to succeed. The prompt clarifies what secrets may entail: “such secrets may create conflict, provide a source of consolation, protect characters from reality, or allow one character to manipulate other characters.” From my reading, I found that students found a variety of entry points to a discussion of their work, presumably because the prompt was so accessible. 

– The essays that were good were REALLY good. The essays that scored 1-4-1 all were able to discuss how the secret functions not only in the work itself, but also on a broader scale. I know that sounds like what students should be doing in all their writing, but the connections they were making were far beyond the obvious, superficial ones that students tend to make, e.g. “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “money doesn’t buy happiness,” etc. It really sounded like students were making much deeper connections with the works and how the text reflects the meaning of the work as a whole on a much bigger scale, more so than other prompts/essays I have seen in the past. The strongest essays I found were on Beloved and The Handmaid’s Tale, all of which were able to address the larger societal follies each of the books address.

Grows:

– Many of the essays can still focus on the larger “meaning of the work as a whole.” I did find that there were a fair amount of essays that only discussed the secret in a limited manner, focusing ONLY on how the secret functions narratively, i.e. “The secret hinders the protagonist’s relationships with their peers.” Essays that didn’t move beyond the limited scope of the novel were never able to move beyond a 1-4-0. In my classroom, I wouldn’t award them the thesis point, even though they would technically receive it on the exam. 

– Some of the students’ choice of works were a bit spotty. I saw plenty of essays that had a lot of potential, but they fell apart because their choice of works were much too vast. For example, I read several essays on One Piece (the Manga work), and though I felt like the students were going somewhere with their response, the work itself is SO enormous that they had difficulty stringing their evidence together because the stories become so disconnected from each other. Also, there were lots of essays that simply tried to shoehorn whatever works they did in class even though they didn’t really work that well. Frankenstein, for instance, worked well for many people, but I kind of got the feeling that students were trying to use the novel without actually addressing and focusing on one of the many “secrets” in the work; most students simply said that the monster had to keep his existence a secret from everybody which hurt his relationship with others, which didn’t work really well. 

– Summary. Too much summary. This isn’t an issue that was unique to this prompt, but many students didn’t break that 1-2-0 threshold simply because they weren’t discussing how their plot points (many of which could have worked well) contributed to the meaning of the work as a whole. What I read was a lot of essays that were right on the brink of saying something insightful but falling short because of their inability to discuss how said plot points impacted the work or contributed to the theme.

Moving Forward:

– Since so many students weren’t able to connect the concept of the prompt (secrets) to the theme, I think students may benefit from sentence stems to help bridge that gap. I said this in last year’s write up, but I have my students use the phrasing “which illustrates the theme that” to essentially force them into linking the concept with a theme that extends beyond the scope of the novel. 

– I’ve taught full-length works both ways: 1) by introducing the themes early and 2) allowing students to draw their own conclusions at the end. I don’t necessarily think that either approach is correct or incorrect, but I have found that some of my students treat the themes as an afterthought when we just focus on the themes at the end of the novel. So, moving forward, I think i’ll continue to focus on the themes at the conclusion of our study, but I’ll try to do a better job of introducing those themes at the beginning of the work and continually reinforce them throughout the course of the unit. 

– It may be interesting to give students prompts that have nothing to do with the works we study and help students craft responses that actually work. As said above, even though Frankenstein worked pretty well as a text that could be used in response, many students just weren’t really able to craft a coherent, convincing argument; perhaps a bit of practice with more difficult prompts with certain texts could help them work those creative muscles. 

Anyhow, it was a great experience! Please reach out if you have any more questions! Thanks so much! 

Brian Hannon is the Director of Secondary Curriculum for LMSvoice. He currently teaches AP Literature , AP Language , and English 10 in Alexandria, Virginia. Brian was the co-founder of the poetryN.O.W., and through his involvement with this organization, Brian went on to found the two largest youth poetry events in his area, the Hyper Bole and Louder than a Bomb. When poetryN.O.W. was absorbed by Split This Rock, a non-profit organization in Washington D.C. that meets at the intersection of poetry and social justice, Brian served as their Youth and Education Development Fellow.