The midterm exam is not really about “stuff.” It’s more about what we can do with the stuff.

A transparency theory of the exam is fallacious. It goes like this: you get information from the professor, and try as hard as you can to keep it intact, undistorted, uncontaminated, and finally spit it back to the professor on the exam. This model is wrongheaded in the sense that you, the human factor, are short-circuited out of the picture, since you don’t actually make any difference. You want to be the difference that makes a difference.

An idea is not a thing. It’s a happening, an event. It either happens or it doesn’t. We don’t download ideas. We invent them. This applies to listening and reading as well as speaking and writing.

The midterm is a precious opportunity for us to make sense of the class in a synoptic and panoptic way. All these past weeks, we’ve been tactical maneuverers, encountering authors and ideas in an order over which we have little say, playing a game that the rules of which are beyond our control. All of a sudden, in this time out of time, we inhabit a strategic position vis-à-vis the course materials. We can size them up one by one, boil them down into consumable bites, and line them up side by side. We can rub them against each other and see what sparks can be generated, or we can pit them against each other and see which argument seems to prevail, or we can organize them into a strategic formation and build a momentum which we can bring to bear on a problematic situation. Finally we can develop a synthetic map. Finally we get this halcyon moment when we can reorganize the whole thing as we like, when we can tie together the loose ends, and smooth over the rough edges. Finally we get to invent new things out of the raw materials. Finally, there is room (space-time) for play and interplay.

The most interesting space is the interval, the liminal, in-between space, between authors, between ideas. The interval is a contact zone where ideas come into touch with other ideas, where authors dialogue with one another, where high-impact clashes take place. When we ask the question “What would A say to B about X?” we invoke and bring into dialogue two bodies of literature.

The most interesting moment is the threshold moment, the joint of time, the turning point. It’s precisely such points that give form and structure to a course, that “articulate” it, in a literal sense. It’s nice to have a midterm, when we can look back and look forward, reflect and expect.

When we cram for an exam, we are exercising animal diligence, not human intelligence. There is nothing transparent or neutral about “objective questions,” or the multiple-choice format. It positions us as animals.

Condemn the tyranny of the multiple-choice format, for it leaves little room for interpretation and imagination. To be deprived of our birthright to come at issues in an oblique way is to be enslaved. By contrast, an essay exam makes us more resourceful. As Marshall McLuhan puts it, “The medium is the message.” An essay exam models resourcefulness as an active disposition, as a value, as an ethos. To trade in enslavement of the mind for polymetis – is there a better way of acting out our sovereignty and authenticity as college students?

The midterm is a moment of dramatic realization, for the examiner as well as the examinee.

Each iteration is a reiteration. An idea put in a new context becomes a new idea. It gains a new life and displays a new vitality.

The midterm marks a temporal and psychic juncture, where a collective interpretive horizon starts to take shape and reveal itself, where a learning community comes into its own. It reminds us that real learning is predicated upon a necessary and meaningful duration, upon the depth of time, and that information theory has no place in the transformative process of learning.

One can have access to tons of searchable information but that says nothing about learning. Learning relies on tangible contexts and readiness of the mind. “For no gift comes to you unprepared-for. And that visitation comes not, if there be no house ready to receive it” (Saint Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands, 206). We need to make a “clearing” for it first, as Martin Heidegger would say. The net result of learning is an embodied disposition, a positive virtue that is ready to translate into practical effectiveness. There is a world of difference between an embodied disposition and “just-in-time knowledge.”

Like many other challenging situations, if the midterm does not kill us, it’ll make us stronger.

We second-guess ourselves to death. Too often, “What does s/he want from us” keeps us from realizing that perhaps s/he is more curious about what we have to say about such and such. What we take to be falsity may well harbor a productive energy, a positive power. Perhaps we should shoot for provocativeness, rather than mere correctness. In the last analysis, it’s actually not about allegedly objective knowledge detached from the knower, or the spoken about not tinged by any speaking position. We don’t have access to the thing-in-self, after all. As Henri Lefebvre puts it: “the world that offers itself up to us is relative to our senses and the instruments we have at our disposal… another scale would determine another world. The same? Without doubt, but differently grasped” (Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, 83). What exactly do we get from the course readings if not each author’s view of things – assertions and arguments called into being by the specific angst of a specific interpretive community? Similarly, our answers to exam questions cannot but be once-occurrences, haecceities. That doesn’t mean there’s no distinction between more useful answers and less useful answers.

“I’ve never had a problem with spelling or sentence construction. Then one day, this professor circled a number of expressions in my essay exam. Isn’t that odd?”

“Looks like none of the professors you’ve encountered before cares about you as much. When you have a piece of spinach between your teeth, only the one who really cares about you will tell you about it. No point getting defensive. It’s a sign of love.”