Like Anne, I’m both impressed by and unsure of the
grading philosophies discussed in these readings – it makes me feel tired just
thinking about the kind of derision you’d get from non-humanities folks in
regard to this kind of strategy, and all the pigheaded traditionalists you’d have to sing and dance for getting these plans to become the norm. However, the
simple truth of the matter is this: evaluating writing is its own animal, and, as beginning teachers, what better time
than now to start considering different methods of evaluation? And even if we
can’t implement these ideas immediately, what with all the university red tape,
we can keep them in our back pocket for the future, when we (hopefully) have
more clout. In the wake of No Child Left Behind and other bastions of standardized
testing, students come to us seeming less skilled in the language arts than
ever (or maybe that’s just the curmudgeon in me). Who’s going to make these
changes if not new teachers like us?
My one practical concern is how the students are going to deal with this. Something about Inoue’s
rubric-making activities seemed a bit rose colored. Students come to us ingrained with the letter grading practices
from high school and earlier. There is already a kind of perception of English
classes as being tedious, feminizing, and impractical. A student once asked me:
if there’s no definite answer, what’s the point? So. How will we deal with students
who resist the idea of self-evaluation and community-oriented assessment, or
who refuse to take the class seriously? I really think these kinds of problems go
deeper than just academics, and we’re going to have to really get our hands
dirty if we want to change everybody’s opinion about evaluating the language
arts.
Still, I am interested in experimenting with rubric-making
activities, maybe in a more guided way than Inoue describes. I think the
students at Mizzou would be able to come up with something thoughtful based on
what they were assigned to read in the Ally & Bacon -- but I still worry about the kind of resistance I might meet. A number of my students are convinced that they are terrible writers; they want me to tell them "how to write."
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