Here is what Joanie Mackowski, who judged the poetry contest, thought of the winning poem, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds”:

“Stretching its keen observations and minutely choreographed sentences over the advancing paw prints of its lines, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds” makes language ductile and makes the reader recall the animal and chemical pleasures of reading. This poem finds an atomic pulse: ‘thing & song// in their wild fullness full’.” The poem will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of ALR.

“My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace Haddad, 16, said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.”

“People look at my family and think I’m like that,” said Joseph, their 14-year-old, as his parents walked through the street fair on Ninth Avenue, giving out Bibles. “I keep my friends as far away from them as possible.”

“I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore,” he said, “because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.”

His mother said she accepted that believers “lose friends and you lose family members in the process.”

“I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Haddad Carson said. “I’m very excited about the Lord’s return, but I’m fearful that my children might get left behind. But you have to accept God’s will.

As I said, I grew up among Premillennialists and on Sunday evenings some traveling evangelist would come to our church and put up his charts proving that we were living in the end times, but at least among the Southern Baptists and Grace Brethren, they always left a little wiggle room about exact dates to get around that canonical statement of Jesus that no one knew when he’d be turning up again. That’s probably why this sort of stupidity makes me so angry.

Harold Camping is the leader of this cult:

On May 21, the saved will go to straight to heaven to meet Jesus, he claims. The unsaved, including those already dead, “will never have conscious existence again…That person himself will not know anything about it they are dead,” he said.

“Christ has no pleasure in the death of the unsaved. It is an enormous comfort about our loved ones,” he added. “Pray they die quickly.”

It’s not that I was overwhelmed with work — the number of papers and conferences and faculty meetings was about average, I guess. But I admit to feeling a little bit demoralized by my students this term. I had a long wrangle with some of the students in my Honors seminar on modernity because they really didn’t believe the course had anything to do with their careers and they really didn’t like the fact that I kept asking open-ended questions that did not appear to yield to the usual procedures of problem solving. Seniors in the Honors Program have mastered the art of problem solving, though in many cases they have not mastered much else. [Here is what I wrote on our class blog after turning my grades in.] But at least the wrangle with the Honors seniors involved the active expenditure of effort; the vast majority of the sixty students in the two sections of my Literature of American Popular Music course simply absorbed energy like sodden little black holes. Out of the sixty there were perhaps half a dozen who tried from time to time to help be ignite a discussion, but their efforts were ultimately futile in the face of the pervading passivity and sullenness.

This was a course in which we read Howl and The Dharma Bums and listened to Monk and Bird and watched video of Lady Day singing accompanied by Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. We watched documentaries about Dylan and listened to old ballads about murder and adultery. And they just fucking sat there. As if none of it means anything. I’m tempted to never teach the course again — the students don’t deserve it. It profanes the sacred texts to exhibit them to such dolts.

Assessment, of course, is all the rage in education policy circles these days. The result is mostly a dreary proliferation of standardized tests at the K through 12 level and an equally dreary emphasis on “outcomes assessment” in higher education, in which the outcomes must be quantifiable. The problem is that lots of meaningless things can be quantified and stuck in spread sheets and made to look significant when the truth is that the numbers say little or nothing about the experiences students are actually having with texts and ideas. I think it is perfectly reasonable for students and their families, and even state and federal government agencies who fund education, to ask colleges to assess the relative success or lack of success they are having in educating students; but my notions about what constitute success are probably not what they are thinking of in the dean’s office or in the high councils of the education bureaucracy.

I consider myself a successful teacher of literature when I get students to develop a set of humane critical attitudes that they are able to apply to reading and writing about literary texts, with “literary” being very broadly defined to include everything from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan and and much of popular culture. We certainly need not confine ourselves to “high” or canonical arts and texts, though this does not, in my view, relegate value judgments to the ash heap of history. If I have a distinctive approach to literary studies, it would be raising the question of literary value outside the stultifying categories of high and popular culture.

But how do you measure the development of a humane and critical attitude, even you you can get more than a handful of literature professors to agree that that is what they ought to be doing — to say nothing of deans and bureaucrats? I am certainly not as assessment guru — most of the research I’ve looked at makes my eyes glaze over and then roll back in my head. In terms of the task my colleagues were engaged in today, I would say that we could certainly design a more effective rubric for writing in the Humanities and probably another for writing in the Social Sciences, but even this presents a serious problem for our interdisciplinary department, which includes faculty who work within both of these discourses. We all agree — at least we did today — that the basic rubric we were using today is almost entirely without merit, designed primarily to generate numbers that can be attached to our first-year Clarkson Seminar course, which is Clarkson’s version of “Freshman English,” despite the fact that a minority of the faculty teaching the course are “English teachers,” though that is how most of our students regard them.

It seems to me that one could possibly define and then start to measure evidence for two dimensions of thought that cross virtually all disciplinary boundaries: Analysis & Synthesis, or Understanding & Imagination. There are probably other names and I’d argue that, at the very bottom, the two dimensions line up pretty neatly with Reading and Writing. Assessment could be conducted as follows: Give students excerpts from three texts with related themes and or ideas — or perhaps five excerpts — and ask students to read them carefully in preparation for a writing assignment. Next, students would be asked to write a short essay or around three pages in which they described as clearly as possible the central idea that they have drawn from the three texts (if using five, they’d choose three). This would be a take-home essay that could then be uploaded to a service like Turnitin.com for evaluation by a group of instructors using a rubric that would measure 1. basic mechanics (2 points); understanding of the texts (4 points), and Imagination (6 points). Or something like that. The details are less important than the central idea.

Silver’s novel demonstrates what can be accomplished with the basic materials of realist narrative and style. The story is recounted by Ares, now an adult but recalling events that occurred when he was twelve. The plot is rigorously chronological and the prose limpid and without a hint of authorial narcissism. Ares and his younger half-brother Malcolm, who is severely autistic, live with their single mother in a trailer in Bombay Beach, on the Salton Sea. Laurel, the boys’ mother, has fled the pieties and restraints of a Midwestern childhood and come to rest in the desolation of Imperial County. The novel’s plot is too delicate a machine to summarize, but from the opening pages it is apparent that some terrible event will divide the characters’ lives into a stark before and an after. If the heroes of the Greek theater were doomed by the capricious but implacable decrees of the Gods, the ordinary people in this story are propelled toward their fates by the implacability of mere chance. But Ares, the god of war, discovers comes to rest in the strength bestowed by integrity — his mother’s, his brother’s, and his own.