1. Reflect upon the process of responding to multiple choice, close reading questions about Cannery Row and the prologue. Also, reflect upon the process of creating your own questions and discuss how you wrote the questions.
Having to create a set of multiple choice questions for an excerpt from Cannery Row was much more… time-consuming than I anticipated for two reasons: the excerpt had to contain sufficient material from which I would be able to draw questions and the questions for the various pieces of the excerpt had to be tricky enough that they would not be intuitive, that is, I would have to look for a passage that allows for multiple interpretations and choose questions as well as answers that are complex enough to throw the reader in for a loop.
Once I had chosen my excerpt I started constructing my questions. I began by choosing one of the three question types we were to use (interpretation, comprehension, literary device) and answering it in detail. I wondered how an AP test maker would build their answers and set that as my benchmark for how difficult I wanted my questions to be. I began to cut down on the length of my answer so as to make it a little bit vague. I wouldn’t want the specificity of my answer to give it away immediately so I opted to either remove the parts of my answer that made it seem too detailed or showered my false answers in other details to make them seem appealing. After building my main answer, I started to think of what wrongful impressions I had of the part of the excerpt I was answering when I first read it. My logic was the following: if on the first reading I would have jumped at this answer, then it was worth putting as a false lead.
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