If I had to choose one word to encapsulate the Advanced Placement Literature course, it would be complexity. This word shows up in almost every prompt: Analyze the complexity of a relationship or a speaker’s encounter or a character’s response. The difficult thing is that students often don’t know what that word means when it comes to analyzing a text. What makes a relationship complex? Or, how can an encounter between two people have complexity?
When you read a text for the first time, you can draw certain conclusions rather easily. For example, on a first read of Cinderella, you would easily conclude that Cinderella and her stepmother have a bad relationship. But if I want to explore the complexities of the relationship, I have to dig deeper and explore some of the gray areas. Defining the relationship as bad is the simple interpretation, but a more complex interpretation might conclude that the stepmother’s cruel actions are fueled by jealousy of Cinderella or that Cinderella’s blind optimism is harmful because it perpetuates her mistreatment: She never stands up for herself or expresses how she is being hurt by her stepmother.
I often find that students want to quickly draw that obvious conclusion and leave it at that. Cinderella and her stepmother’s relationship sucks…Moving on! So, although exploring complexity helps my AP students prepare for the tasks they will be asked to do on the exam, this is also a skill that I need to develop with all of my classes.
Starting with the Students
To introduce complexity at the beginning of the school year, I start with what students know best—themselves. Human beings are complex by nature. No one is all bad or all good; it’s more complex than that! Interestingly, though, high school students tend to put each other into boxes: He’s an athlete, she’s an artist. To dispel this misconception, I ask students to consider a trait or value that they think defines them. Then I ask them to think of the antonym or opposite of that trait or value and consider how that word can apply to their personality as well.
In the slides below, Sydney identifies how people outwardly see her confidence, yet she sometimes struggles with insecurities. The key word here is yet: It always helps us to see that most people (and characters) can have opposing traits and values, and that is what makes them complex.
Looking for Complexity in Popular Culture
Another area where students are well versed is popular culture. Gina Kortuem of the blog Lit & More suggests asking students to look for complexity in song lyrics and movie clips. This year I asked students to watch the video for “If the World Was Ending” by JP Saxe, which shows a split screen of a man and a woman as they sing about their relationship. Upon a closer read of the song’s lyrics, I ask students to make a claim about the complexity of this relationship. Once again, I encourage students to use the word yet to indicate that the relationship is not just one thing, but actually two opposing things at once. Jacob came up with the following assessment:
The complexity here is that they both know that they weren’t really meant to be in a long-lasting relationship with each other yet it is clear that they both still care for and respect each other because they are talking about how in the situation where the world was ending, they would come over and care for each other, because there would be no long-term strings attached.
After working through this example as a class, students can then look for their own examples of complexity that they find in other song lyrics, movie clips, or TV shows.
Using Mentor Texts
Once students are ready to find complexity within the texts they are reading, they still sometimes struggle to put their ideas into writing. A mentor sentence can give students a structure to imitate that will help them organize their ideas. The following passage from Winston Churchill’s description of Henry VIII in Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples is an example of a complex sentence structure that reveals two different sides of Henry VIII:
“To those who saw him often he seemed almost like two men: one the merry monarch of the hunt and banquet and procession, the friend of children, the patron of every kind of sport; the other cold, acute observer of the audience chamber or the Council, watching vigilantly, weighing arguments, refusing except under the stress of great events to speak his own mind.”
I asked my students to use this sentence as a model for writing about a character in the books they were reading. This is Christian’s version about the character Jacob from Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen:
Those who knew Jacob saw two different men: one the innocent introvert, simply there to serve the animals, always having the best intentions, kind to his acquaintances; the other a home-wrecker, lashing out in violence, taking unnecessary provisions to protect the ones he cares about, revealing the subtle darkness that lies behind that innocent exterior.
Many students then used their version of the sentence as the thesis statement for a character analysis essay.
Conclusion
When students are still having trouble identifying complexity, I move to a visual interpretation. A visual way to interpret complexity in a character is to have students plot a character on a continuum and justify their placement. For the same character from Water for Elephants, Holly completed the following continuum:
Good _______X_____________________ Bad
Jacob’s actions are always with good intention, which is why he is more towards the good side. However, he sometimes takes unethical approaches in order to achieve his goals. For example, he has a very violent instinct when confronted with situations such as the abuse of Rosie. He feels a need to attack August physically rather than settle him down with words. I also took “good points” off because he falls in love with a married woman and doesn’t exactly hold back.
In the following example, students were plotting characters from Shakespeare’s Othello on a continuum of “player” (in control of their own actions) versus “pawn” (controlled by others).
Most things in this world are complex—our feelings, our motivations, our identities—and becoming accustomed to noticing complexities in our daily lives makes us not only better readers and thinkers, but better human beings, as well.
