Sunday, July 10, 2011
grading
I'm reading Elbow's Ranking, Evaluating, and Judging article. Some parts make me think he's taking a line right out of my life. Elbow talks about "why we hate it so when students ask us their favorite question, "What do you want for an A?": it rubs our noes in the unreliability of our grades." I can't remember how many times I've asked or thought, "What do I have to write for an A." It has been about the end product, not the learning process, the journey of learning the material. That's because most the time what I've been learning was not valuable to me. Teacher's rankings lead many A students to "end up doubting their true ability and feeling like frauds--because they have sold out on their own judgment and simply given teachers whatever yields and A." I can't count how many times I've given teachers what they want and felt no pride on even agreement with what I've written. Every time I got an A on the paper. I call this being an expert at BS and at one point thought that's what writing was. If I had wrote a paper I believed in that didn't follow what granted an A I wouldn't have written another one. Ranking was and is important to me. Yet the problem with evaluating Elbow notes is that different readers have different interpretations of what is good writing. Elbow suggests many examples to have less ranking and more evaluating. Yay! One question answered!
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I love Peter Elbow's writing...and he makes me almost think I could have a classroom like he describes! haha...I agree with you about the "A" papers, though. With some teachers, it was almost too easy to get that A--so it didn't really mean much.
ReplyDeleteAshley, I am really interested to hear how this might all play out in second grade...
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that you say that because most of my students don't get the idea of grades yet. Only the high fliers seemed to care about their grades or even give my grading comments a second look. I give them feedback on their writing such as plus/deltas and what I think they did well/not well on. I give them rubrics to self evaluate. Yet grading doesn't mean so much to them. Maybe it's tied into not have letter grades yet or parents not putting importance on them. I struggle with balancing how much emphasis I put on grades vs. not because I want them to know grades are important but not to get overly stressed about them. I don't want my kids to think writing is getting the A but a process of self discovery. So I see giving the grade but putting more emphasis on evaluating with portfolios and learning from previous mistakes by analyzing them. I want to do more collaborative looking at why this piece (in children's opinions) is better than this one and how I can build upon it.
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