Whither the German AP Program?

Abstract

When I agreed to speak to this year's Advanced Placement Conference on the pedagogical value of the German Program, I only vaguely realized the difficulty of the assignment.1 As a loyal, dues-paying member of the AATG I had of course received and perused the September, 1965 issue of the German Quarterly with its several articles on the subject, but when setting out to restudy the issue in preparation for the present conference I soon became aware of how very important, in fact how exemplary that collection of articles still is, not only for the German AP Program, but also as evidence of really effective cooperation between people who work at all levels of German teaching in the U.S.A. In particular, since I was selected to represent a college teacher's perspective on AP in German, I was again impressed and this time not a little frightened by the quality of Professor Ryder's contribution to that number of the GQ, his thoughtful and humane discussion of Literature in High School--A College Point of View.2 Of course, since that issue of the GQ appeared three years ago the Program itself has changed--a little. The reading lists have been modified--somewhat; the testing procedure has undergone shifts in emphasis--one or two; and as we have found out over the past couple of days here in Rochester, the concept and logistics of the AP Program are not without problems and difficulties. Yet that classic issue of our journal casts a broad shadow indeed--perhaps you can understand if at this moment I confess that I empathize strongly with Strapinski at the house of the Amtsrat in Goldach: Er nahm jetzt seine Gedanken zusammen und hielt den rechten Zeitpunkt einer geraiuschlosen Beurlaubung fiir gekommen. Let me begin by repeating that word empathize, and attaching a few remarks to its function in AP work in high school. There are few words in the vocabulary of criticism that young people latch onto with greater ease and rapidity than this one, unless it is relevance or identify or impact. All of these terms you have surely heard and read from your students and probably even used yourselves, as I have, when discussing works of literature in and out of the classroom. We do use them, though I suspect that we hate ourselves for it each time, for we are tired of hearing them in their jargonized form as BIG WORDS that you're supposed to use in BIG SENTENCES when you talk in a BIG WAY about LITERATURE. This is a shame, because there is nothing inherently onerous about any of the words in question. The ones I