"The Hardest Test in the World"

Hello All!

Hope all is well with you and yours over this Memorial Day weekend. Amid all the barbeques and trips to the beach, let’s remember what the holiday is really about. Thank a Vet, trust me, it makes us happy, and, surprisingly, it never gets old to hear it! :->

On another note, I was reading an article in the New York Times by Sarah Lyall about a test, now discontinued, that had been given at Oxford to prospective fellows for over 75 years. I will share some quotes from the article and then some thoughts on it.

She begins: The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.

“An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question,” is the way historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on “innocence” in 1964, a tour de force effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp in the William Golding novel Free Fall…

Lyall continues: …But it is the one-word-question essay (known simply as “Essay”) that candidates still remember decades later. Past words, chosen by the fellows, included “style,” “censorship,” “charity,” “reproduction,” “morality,” “error,” “possessions,” “novelty,” “chaos” and “mercy.”

And she ends with: …Vickers, the current college warden, has worked as the Bank of England’s chief economist and been president of the Royal Economic Society, among other jobs. He draws a self-protective veil over the memory of his own essay, in 1979, on “conversion.”

“I do shudder at the thought of what I must have written,” he said.

So, those of you who know me understand that I’m a freak and an English professor, two things that go together naturally, don’t you think -- and…I LOVE the idea of that test. Imagine, bringing all types knowledge and genres of writing together to support a thesis while ruminating on only one word. How cool is that??? Since I have more time on my hands than I normally would, I considered what word I would assign to my students, and I also thought about what word I would select for myself.

Initally, I was having a tough time, then the big “doh” reached up and smacked me in the forehead. I’m an idiot! I’m writing a blog about deployment survival, aren’t I? Sooooo… what better word to choose than… Wait for it… Duh! Deployments!! Wow, I’m getting a little slow in my old age. Anyway, I love the idea of writing about one word, it’s the “cohesive” part that scares me a bit. We’ve discussed my lack of linearity, so that might hinder me some, but I do have a knack for tying things together that may not seem to belong together, but in the end (in Kristen-world), they fit just fine. So, I’m going to try this and get back to you with the product.

I will let you know that the first thing I’m struck by is how each of the words from past tests Lyall highlighted in her article –

“innocence,” “water,” “bias,” “style,” “censorship,” “charity,” “reproduction,” “morality,” “error,” “possessions,” “novelty,” “chaos” and “mercy” –

all can be connected to my essay on deployments. If I were feeling particularly snarky, I could probably fit them all in one paragraph, connect them with lines of Haiku and song lyrics, and sprinkle in a couple of Newton’s laws – and BAM! Oxford, here I come. But, I guess I’ll never know since they’ve discontinued the test. Pity!

I’ll give myself three hours and post what I come up with over the next couple of days. We’ll see how hard this really is. And, as for y’all, what words would you have the most fun writing about? I’d love to steal some of them as writing assignments for my students. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on “deployments,” too. A one word response to a one word test might be kind of cool. Depending on the day, my response would ricochet between:

Deployments – Rock!


And

Deployments – Suck!


What words stick in your heads?