View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Adam say these figures can trigger?

2. How long was Adam unconscious after his concussion?

3. What does Ziegler hear, once he can understand this language?

4. What is the model of the bike Darren rides?

5. Where is Ziegler carted away to, at the end of the story?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Darren’s job, and how did he lose it?

2. What was Jonathan studying for his dissertation?

3. What is the spread and why is it controversial?

4. What happens in the Herman Hesse story Jonathan talks about?

5. What importance did Jonathan’s therapist attach to his interest in the Ziegler story?

6. How does the narrative tone change when Bob Dole enters the high school where the debate is taking place?

7. How did fame change things for Jane?

8. How does the narrator describe the importance of the spread beyond debate?

9. Where is Darren’s refuge, and what solace does he take there?

10. How does the narrator say that Darren uses chants?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Make a graphic representation of the action, development, and progress of The Topeka School. Then explain your work: what are the best variables by which to chart the book’s movement? What comes forward in a graphic representation that might be lost in an analytic paper?

Essay Topic 2

Evaluate the ending of The Topeka School. Does it ring true to you? Does it successfully resolve the problems and tensions that preceded it? What would you change, if anything? What are you left wishing for closure on, if anything?

Essay Topic 3

What is missing from this book? What should have been covered or presented that was not? What is the effect of this absence? Describe an element that ought to have been covered, and explain why it would have made the book stronger.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 977 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample