Humor by John Christmann
F Is For Final
Recently my son took the first final exam of his academic career. As firsts go, this is not all that memorable. As far as I am concerned it ranks right up there with shaving for the first time: when you do a good job you don’t improve your situation all that much and when you do a bad job . . . well, you get the picture. But rightly or wrongly, you are evaluated on how well you do.
Thanks to me, he was pretty nervous about the whole thing.
You see, several weeks before his exam I discovered that he was sitting on a mediocre grade in his seventh grade English class. I was shocked. English is one of his better subjects.
“You have a C?” I asked.
“Yeah!” he said cheerfully, “my grade is coming up!”
“Coming up?”
That’s when I learned that during the fall when he was busy playing soccer, several of his homework assignments were late or incomplete. And then, on a project designed to exemplify a theme central to a book the class was reading, he was penalized significantly for lack of effort. The assignment was a simple one: he was to convey a personality trait by creating an animal mask. I learned about the project the night before it was due. In a panic we ran to Staples just before it closed to get a large sheet of poster board. He colored it furiously with a crayon, cut a couple of eye holes, and then stretched a pair of my voluminous underwear around the bottom. He held the large sheet in front of him and peered through the eye holes.
“Are you sure Sponge Bob Square Pants is what the teacher has in mind?” I asked him.
Apparently it wasn’t, because he received a very low grade for his ten minutes of effort.
And now, to bring his grade to a level that I deemed worthy of his capabilities, he had to do well on his final exam. I reminded him of this often. I gave him lecture after lecture on the importance of finals. I gave him pointers on how to take tests, how to work fast and smart, how to check his work. I told him every trick I learned to successfully negotiate big exams: flash cards, practice tests, sucking up to teachers, pulling all-nighters, drinking massive amounts of coffee, studying with the genius kids that looked like Bill Gates. And when I was finished he looked at me with the enlightened eyes of a deer studying a rapidly looming Mac Truck.
I don’t remember my first final. I don’t think most people do. But I certainly remember the first exam I failed. It was my first year of high school. After what was a surprisingly easy term in Freshman Science, I approached the test sure of my abilities. I had done well on the homework, on the quizzes, on the labs. I knew my stuff. As I confidently sat down to breeze through the final, the teacher handed me a single page with a blank chart. At the top it said simply: Please fill out the Periodic Table of the Elements. The final was worth 117 points. I discovered later that this number coincided exactly with the number of elements that I had failed to memorize.
I quickly filled in the elements I knew: hydrogen and helium. Then I sat for forty-five minutes alternately looking at a white sheet of paper and the clock. The life that I was about to live passed before my eyes. I would never go to college. I would never get a job. I would die a pauper and be buried underneath a simple wood marker that eternalized the sum total of my achievements in just four words: He knew two elements. Worst of all, my parents would permanently ground me from watching TV.
Panic set in, then ultimately, painful resignation. It turned in my gut like the slow moving screw of a ruptured Titanic. When time finally ran out, I reluctantly scribbled my name on the empty exam and exited the classroom in a dead run. Many years later I would experience a similar sensation in a corporate board room after I nervously rose to give a sales presentation and spilled coffee all over my lap. It was a long, painful, and damp presentation, and I gave it with the confidence of someone who, for all intents and purposes, had just peed in his pants.
Fortunately for my son, his teacher had explicitly told the class what was to be on the test: a written essay about the use of suspense in story telling. The night before the exam we reviewed his material. We talked about the concept of foreshadowing, about how good story tellers create uncertainty and tension around events that threaten the welfare of the characters. We talked about pacing and surprise and creating scenes that leave the audience wondering what will happen next. We talked about structuring the essay, about writing fully formed paragraphs, about avoiding repetitive and superfluous words that detract from clarity. I quizzed him over and over until he was ready.
The next morning I dropped him off at school. He was apprehensive, and his head was swimming with my last minute instructions. Helpful instructions like don’t forget to put your name on the test and make sure your pencil is sharpened and look over the test before you start writing and don’t be nervous it’s only a final exam. He seemed anxious to get out of the car.
“So how was it?”
Despite my best efforts at restraint, these were the very first words out of my mouth when I saw him after school.
His shoulders slumped. He didn’t say anything for a minute, and then he surrendered the news he was obviously hoping to avoid.
“Dad, it was really hard,” he said, looking at his feet. “The teacher wanted us to write a story! And it had to be three hundred words! I had trouble starting and I just . . . froze. When I finally thought of something to say I only had five minutes left!”
Now my shoulders slumped. I could only imagine what he had written. Or in this case, what he had not written. I felt like I was standing outside a boardroom with wet trousers. I was disappointed. For both of us.
“I’m sorry Dad,” he said.
“It’s OK.” I told him, putting my arm around him. But it wasn’t. Because we both knew how capable he was.
Two days later the mail arrived with a large envelope from his English teacher. It was addressed to my son. I suspected it might be the results of his English exam. I desperately wanted to open it, but I was afraid. I was afraid to confirm my worst suspicion that he had done poorly despite my well meaning attempts to help him. In some respects this final exam grade was also my own, and I was dying to know how we did.
I held the envelope up to the light. I could just make out what was inside. It was his English exam. The top third was dark with writing. The bottom was full of red marks. Blotches of red. Like the first time I ever shaved. My heart sank.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I was standing high on a ladder outside our garage holding the envelope up to a high intensity spot light.
“This came.” I said sheepishly, tossing my son the envelope.
He tore it open and looked at his exam. He said nothing, then smiled.
“Tell me, tell me!” I said, “How did we do?”
“I did great!” he said.
And then he turned and walked away, purposely leaving me high on a ladder, hanging in suspense.
Epilogue
You are to write a simple story demonstrating common elements of suspense. Please be original. Your story must be at least three hundred words, excluding titles.
The Three Hundred Words
For Wally Wordsworth time was running out. He glanced nervously at the large clock on the wall tightly clutching a stubby pencil in his hand. If he didn’t complete a simple story demonstrating common elements of suspense, and be original, and write a story that was at least three hundred words, excluding titles, he would fail his final exam. And if he failed, there was no telling what his father would say.
Wally counted the words in front of him. Eighty-one. He needed more words. And they had to be good words too. He couldn’t use a lot of empty words to fill the page like like, and and, or or, or because, because they had to be words that created a feeling of uncertainty and tension. They had to be words that foreshadowed the terrible events that would unfold if he failed his exam, like the nightmare he had where his father was yelling at him for failing his exam because he couldn’t come up with three hundred words. They had to be words that said that something very important was at stake. Like the ability of a seventh grader to continue playing video games after school.
Wally began to panic. He should be writing words right now, lots and lots of words, but all he could think of was his father’s disappointment when he showed an exam marked with a large red F in the huge expanse of white space where many more suspenseful words were supposed to be. Three hundred. Wally wrote the number as if that would somehow help him come up with the words he needed. But it wasn’t enough. As the teacher called time, Wally Wordsworth did one final count and then dejectedly turned in an essay containing only two hundred ninety-nine words.
The End = 301 words!!!
Very creative approach! Well done! Let’s talk next semester about developing your ideas more!
A-
Please have your father sign this and return to me!
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