The exam:

In answering the questions below, please remember that this is an English course–sound mechanics, spelling, punctuation are assumed. None of these answers should be less than 200 words in length, nor longer than 500. The same grading criteria used to grade the homework discussion–posted in the course syllabus–will be used. The exam will be scored as a whole.

DON’T FORGET TO PARAGRAPH!

The whole exam is worth 10% of your grade.

Answer each of these questions:

Essays:

1. The quality of the course discussion has become increasingly sophisticated as the course has progressed. This is, of course, a good thing. It does mean that you might want to rethink some answers, change your mind, redirect your thinking, in the answers you gave to discussion questions earlier in the course, in light of what you’ve learned.

Choose one discussion question [not the whole lesson, just one question] from the first six lessons in the course and revise to improve your answer. Make sure you:

•Identify the lesson/discussion board where the original is located

•Discuss why you decided to rewrite this answer

•Discuss what changed for you since you wrote the answer the first time.

2. There has been a fair amount of discussion about violence in fairy tales, and how inappropriate such content may be for children in the 21st century. Many of you have discussed why you object to violence in the fairy tales we read early in the course. There are some kinds of violence that few of you object to–for instance, the punishment of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, or the killing of the violent Bluebeard. Then there are all the robberies that are attempted—like in “The Day it Snowed Tortillas.” And no one said much about the violence of the Holocaust in the background of Singer’s stories, that kept the Jews in their places at the bottom of the economic order.

Why is one story’s kind of violence inappropriate while another’s violence is accepted almost without notice? Is there ever a place for violence in works of literature for children?

3. One of the stated goals of this course is that the student will find pleasure in reading. Another goal is that you’ll understand the audience and purpose of the kinds of tales we’ve been reading.

Choose one work that we’ve read so far that has pleased you and talk about why you found pleasure in the reading. How did the author adapt the material to hook you as an adult reader?