Articulating Outcomes, Thinking Like an Assessor

Grade level, Subject

My formative and summative assessment will continue to be based on DP1 language and literature, using "Lolita" as the template.

Common Core Standards 

Continuing from my previous post, the common core standard I will be examining will be the CCS12.6: Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.

Formative assessment.

I am making a number of assumptions for this- that students are familiar with a number of literary devices, that they have read at least the first half of the text, and that we have already spent a few classes examining Nabokov's style and the context of the 1950's. For I will divide students into groups of 4. Each person in the group is given a copy of the same two passages. One student each is assigned to underline and annotate one of the following literary devices. Allusion, imagery, unreliable narrator, wordplay. Each student writes a short synopsis of the authors intent considering the device they were supposed to analyze. Afterwards, students compare notes, discuss, and write a single summary for the overall intent of the passage. The samples will then be projected on the whiteboard, students will present their summarized analysis, and teacher and rest of class will discuss, and look for devices missed.

I am looking for students to be able to do 3 things.

1. Identify literary devices.

2. Analyze and interpret the use of literary devices.

3. Summarize the main idea.

Example- She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would—invariably, with icy precision—plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.

From this example, students should have underlined the following.

Example- She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would—invariably, with icy precision—plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.

An example analysis: The Frigid Queen: This is a play on words. Frigid means cold, something he certainly is trying to attribute to lolita- that she is an uncaring, mean girl. Also, frigidity also means someone who doesn't enjoy sex, an unhealthy or abnormal aversion to sex, etc. Here he is trying to reverse the roles- he adores her like a queen, but she treats him coldly and doesn't reward his affectations like one would expect. The reality is much the opposite- he is abusing her without a care for her feelings.

Example summary: In this passage, Humbert both dehumanizes and puts Lolita on a pedestal. She is portreyed as a cruel controller of Humbert's desires. This reflects his desire to make the audience feel empathy for his position, but his arguments work against themselves. Lolita can either be a rebellious instrument of Humbert's desires or the master of them, not both. 

Summative Assessment

The summative assessment will take everything the students have practiced learning- summarizing main ideas, identifying and analyzing evidence and using it to support the thesis. The only thing the formative doesn't directly check that the summative does is students ability to winnow or select the strongest evidence to support their thesis. However, the requirement that they summarize the main idea in part addresses this, at least through the example I've given, which would be a part of my instructions to them and in the discussion afterwards. This summative is an end of year exam. This would be graded based on the official IBDP LAL rubrics.

The following excerpt is from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. You have 1 hour to write an analytical essay. Be sure to use the two prompts listed at the bottom of the text.

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.

Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze—God bless the good man—had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph.

My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it—it made a cupped polished plop.

Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.

“Give it back,” she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist. Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

-What is the intended effect of the allusions seen here?

-In what ways does Humbert convince us that he is a victim?