Grades Suck

I'm keeping the syllabus conversation going. Below is an edited response to Bill Thelin, one of my good friends, who spends, I think, a fair amount of time negotiating a syllabus with his students. He cited Ira Shor's practice of negotiating a syllabus, described in When Students Have Power and Empowering Education. I think Bill also gives more importance to grades than I do. I think grades suck.

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 To Bill: If one demotes the function of the syllabus, then we don’t have to waste a lot of time on it. The syllabus, to my mind, is mostly a bureaucratic invention, serving more as a document to circulate outside the classroom. If one takes up seriously (and this Ira did—and to me, that was his main point; which was also Freire’s point) learning as collaboration rather then delivery (deconstructing, as F put it, the student/teacher dichotomy), then we don’t have to spend a lot of time negotiating a bureaucratic construction. Rather, we’re here to work on our writing; let’s go. 

I think the teacher also has to let the students know how the course will be run, the primary goals, and the kind of projects the teacher and students will be doing. The teacher also has to find ways of getting useful feedback from students and know how to adjust in light of that feedback. Ira used the after-class-group; I use a class journal. 

I think objectifying the institutional imperatives could be useful. But we should also note that in many ways, those imperatives are elastic and often disposable. We make our own choices as teachers about which ones we’ll follow (and the degree to which we want to bend our principles in order to have a job). 

We will disagree on grades: no, we don’t need them. They are silly. I don’t need them. The students don’t need them (I recognize the imperialism in that claim—let’s say they have been taught to need them, but most of them seem to know better). The bureaucracy needs them because they think they need them as a consequence of a structural inadequacy. 

Within this discussion, let me highly recommend 

Schmidt, J. (2001). Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives. New York: Rowan and Littlefield.

I think anyone in the field of education should read Schmidt’s book. I think Schmidt would interpret grades as a way of inducing stress and maintaining control. You have to maintain control when you have adopted an adversarial rather than a collaborative stance.

The Research Paper

A recent discussion on the WPA list concerning documentation styles made me think of some essays my students wrote recently. With Joe Harris and Patty Ericsson, I (I think I'm reading them correctly, but with Joe and Patty, one never knows) don't really spend much time with documentation style. Along with teaching the more or less decontextualized research paper, this is wasted instruction and really not a whole lot of fun. They all use Easybib, but as Joe said--who cares? At most, our students might have to use a particular documentation style in other classes; if other teachers think documentation is important, they can use their class time teaching students about commas here and there. Actually, I do spend a little time on this, but it's minor--somewhere in the orbit of the ablative absolute.

I  think research is important, but as I have probably written elsewhere in this blog, I like to naturalize research. Students are doing it all the time--they just don't know how to link it to the kind research we do--the kind very few of them will ever be doing in the post-collegiate lives.

I'm going to print a research paper from one of my students below.  I have the students first write essays telling the rest of us about their (the writers') previous writing experiences and their attitudes toward writing and themselves as writers.

These quick essays are fascinating to read. Students like to write them; they like to read them, and I like to read them--so that makes it a pretty good writing assignment. In addition, we all learn more about learning --and not learning about writing. We write these essays in class--about 15 minutes. They are remarkably good essays for coming right out of the students' brains.

Then we read and write back to each other. I really like doing this. I also ask them to take notes when they see something interesting that they can use for the next essay--which is to generalize about students' experiences with writing.

For their next class, I  ask them to take about thirty minutes and write a brief essay generalizing from their own experiences and from what they have read from others. This, of course, is research--going outside your head to check with external sources. The students have never considered something like this is research--or the results of their investigation, reporting what they learned, as a research paper. It is, however, my kind of research paper. When YOU think of it, it's not that far from the kind of research I and many of my friends on this list do.

Link to what I asked the students to do:

Directions for Generalizing

As far as documentation, I tell the students that it's kind to tell your readers where you got your information and let them know how to find it themselves. In the essay below, we didn't need to document because they all knew the writers and where to find the specific essay on our Blackboard site.

I like what Kiera did in her essay (30 minutes, but I suspect she might have taken longer--I'll ask her). I like how she takes her generalizations and moves outward or upward to theorize. She worked from her own experience, generalized from others, and let her mind go, theorizing about the function of writing. Nice.
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Kiera:

From reading my classmates' reflections on their writing experiences, it seems a general trend that most prefer to write with a type of "freedom" (Nicholas), with "no restrictions or limits" (Ksenia). Lydia mentions her love of writing stories to make herself laugh, and Chris Z. mentions the thrill of storytelling, with "barriers lifted". Most of us have experienced the joy of writing, the satisfaction of creating a secret world or reflecting on the one we live in with no one to judge or stop the flow from heart to pen to page.

However, it also seems that many of us have certain prejudices against writing, some stubborn psychological aversion which tells us that we cannot write properly. We "worry people are not going to understand" (Chris J.). We continue to mark our writing mentally with the red pen of our teachers in high school, rating ourselves as "average" (Branston). These red markings may have damaged our view of what writing is, Zoë notes.

Kaila claims that there are too many structured papers demanded during high school, while Michael says he enjoys these types of more straightforward papers. Stephanie found her overall writing education to be "nourishing" to her personal growth.

There seem to be some discrepancies about who we write for, and why we write. High school has taught us "how to write", but what is the value if we have no desire to write? We must look at finding a balance by both writing for necessary assignments and also recreationally for ourselves and loved ones. I think we could also compartmentalize. If we think of academic writing as having to do more with skill than personality, we will feel less vulnerable about criticism of our academic writings. If we think of casual, creative writing as having to do more with personality, we may be more open to share with others through this medium.

We all agree that writing is necessary for our future careers, and this class seems to be a positive start to changing our perspective on the purpose of writing. If we learn to trust our writing more, as Bransten achieved, then we can come to know and trust one another, too. To know someone through writing, and to reveal oneself through writing, is a powerful tool. I do think the word "trust" is key.

Some of us have already taken steps toward becoming comfortable with our own writing. David was insecure about his writing abilities, so he joined the school newspaper to work on it. Sam discovered a passion for historical preservation and how this relates to writing and reading. Dr. Peckham versed himself in grammar and abandoned his romantic notions to discover the fulfilling reality of being a writer. He "ended where [he] wanted to be".

All of us are on a path to realizing how writing can enrich our lives by connecting us with one another and understanding more about our chosen career fields. If we make the choice to get past our existing ideas of writing, negative or positive, I think we will discover new types of writing that work for who we are and where we wish to go.
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Going from here: 
The next obvious assignment (or series) is imagine and construct some kind of survey, distribute and analyze it; do some internet research on specific issues that come out of these exercises; look in the library databases for readable (i.e., not written by rhet/comp scholars--with some exceptions here and there) essays on the subject; then write up singly or in groups the results of what they have learned. At that point, I would like to have them tell readers--like readers of this blog--where they found the information and how the readers could find it also.The would need some kind of documentation.

Grades Again

I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and good friend (a lot of these posts, I realize, are the consequence of conversations in which I wasn't able to explain myself and then woke up at 2:30 the next morning and thought for two or three hours about what I really meant).

The conversation was about portfolios and grades--but of course when one is talking about grades (and portfolios, a method for minimizing the role of grades), one is talking about so much more--and it's that "more" that I want to get to in this post.

My friend and I were in a group discussing the use of portfolios. Somewhere in the conversation I slipped into a rant. Well, first, I was explaining my use of portfolios as a way of minimizing the role of grades in my writing classes. I have the students submit portfolios at mid-quarter and for a final. Portfolios are  easy to  grade to when you basically give mostly As and Bs in your class. As readers of this blog probably know, I start from the assumption that everyone in the class has an A. All they have to do to maintain that grade is never miss class and do all the work, let's say, honestly.

When I frame the rhetorical situation for my students, I tell them that they have to give me portfolios that I could show to outside readers, like deans or chairs, who might challenge my grade distribution (people who imagine the bell curve as real--see bell curve).  Here is an example of my instructions to students:  final portfolio instructions-Engl 103

This simple explanation led to a kind of rant. I noted that people who use the portfolio system and unhook themselves from their addiction to grades (not a good rhetorical move on my part--but I think I said something like that) seem to give more As and Bs than when they used the traditional grading system because their students write better and they write more.

You can see the rant coming. I was slipping into my I-don't-care-what-anybody-else-thinks-because-I'm-right mode.

The logic is that in order to defend this high proportion of As and Bs, the teacher  needs evidence to justify the inordinate supply of As and Bs (this could lead to an interesting conversation about grades, capitalism, zero-sum logic, and supply and demand).

Interlude:

I think I may have mentioned something about co-dependent grade addiction (another bad rhetorical move--but it is worth noting that when teachers argue that students are over-addicted to grades, the pointing finger curves back toward the self).

The more and better claim: Teachers who have overcome their addictions to grades and create in their classrooms a grade-free zone of trust, appreciation, teacher-student collaboration (Freire), and love of writing will see from their students more and better writing. They will see that their students really want to learn--they want to learn more about writing and they want to like to write again--an attitude toward writing generally left behind somewhere around fifth grade. So the students almost necessarily write more and better. The higher grade distribution follows.

Back to the discussion:

My friend said, have you ever had anyone challenge your grade distributions?

He had me there. No, I had to say (but I'll bet they've thought about it). So my constant complaint about fake writing more or less came back into my face.  In my  weak defense: I have--I think even in this blog--used students' portfolios to demonstrate to the Natilie Wexler's (see Personal Writing in the Classroom: A Reply to More Ignorance) of this world that students can write quite well, thank you, that perceptions of "bad writing" may have more to do with bad assignments than with bad writing.

[I'm almost where I imagined I would go ( see Flow)]

Somewhere in the conversation, my friend said he felt as if he wasn't acting fairly if he didn't distinguish between the student who clearly worked hard and wrote well and the student who didn't work as hard and didn't write quite so well.

I will have to admit--I have often when assigning mostly As in my class thought the same thing. I do make gross distinctions--you can see those gross distinctions in the portfolios, but I don't make really fine, criterion-centered judgments, much as I have in the past. Here's what I really think--and I know the lines of logic are blurred:

We should not be socializing our students into reward-dependency: working for the reward. The social reproduction function should be obvious.

I know I'm a romantic, but I simply am unwilling to give up the ideology of looking for the reward in  the action, in the living, in the writing itself, not in the gold star we receive for our performance. I will also add that reward comes from doing something that results in community contribution. I get rewards from knowing I have turned my students on to writing. The money and the grades are highly incidental. I know that we live fuller, richer lives if we focus on living rather than on the gold streets paving Heaven.

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I just had my current students read (online) my portfolio instructions--and I asked them whether there are any questions about it. Here's one of the first replies:

"I have read the instructions and am wondering, is the portfolio more for our sake than for anyone else? At least as far as measuring our own growth, this seems to be a useful tool for self-examination on our parts.

I also think that any department heads or administrators would love to read the type of writing done in this class, although they might find trouble putting specific "grades" to it, because of its subjective nature - is that correct?"

She has it right.

Bad Ideas about Writing

I am responding in part to Cheryl's and Drew's invitation to rant about bad ideas about writing. In their CFP, they referred to the 1975 Newsweek cover article about why Johnny (and Jill) can't write. We can track these complaints back to1828 when Bishop Whately responded to awful student essays by theorizing that instead of having students write declamations about abstractions like "Citizenship" or "Honesty," he had them write from the experiences of their lives: thus, the now infamous "My Summer Vacation" essay.

We know that Harvard's claims about students' inability to write tracked back to the incoming students' inabilities to parse the sentence, “He said that that that that that pupil parsed was not that that he should have parsed” (1870).

If you parsed that :), you don't need to be remediated. It's a cool sentence and brain game. I challenge my students to parse it in the grammar section of their final portfolios at the end of the quarter. A few get it.

But here's what good writing teachers know: students of course can write--look at what my students have written in my links on the right side of this blog. I see good writing flying in from students in our program like . . . like, well, like undocumented drones.

What's  interesting is why certain kinds of people say students can't write. We hear this from politicians, members of the business community, and from many of our colleagues. From the professoriate, complaining about student writing is  a rite of passage.You're not a professor unless you complain about students' inabilities to write. If you think they can write, that just shows how much you know about writing.

Complaints from members of the professorial class may be slanted projections of their own troubled relationships with writing. They are certainly the consequence of their inabilities to create writing situations in which students might want to write (look at my rules for good writing assignments above).

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

WPA Assessing and Dreaming

I had another good day of teaching. I know that the secret of teaching writing and enjoying it lies in discovering writing topics that you know your students will enjoy writing about and you will enjoy reading--and not grading. It's really very simple. I can imagine all the counter arguments--the ones about the importance of academic discourse and everything being an argument and so on. I'm just wondering tonight how the postsecondary structure has trained people to make them believe these arguments--when really, they should know better. They should think about about the wonder of writing, the way in which we find out who we are by writing about it.

My subject for this post is really something else (if I were an idiot writer, I would say, but I digress). It's about assessment.

First, a plug: Norbert Elliot, Ed White, and I just finished our final changes on the Galleys for a book on program assessment that we wrote. It will be out in March.  Here's the link:

Very Like a Whale

I have recently imagined a new frame for assessment--too late to get in that book. Here's the dream:

Let's imagine you are a new WPA.

You inadvertently stumbled on a new and effective paradigm of teaching writing. Your mantra was transfer of affect. One of your Student Learning Priorities was Self-Directed Learning. You imagined that students would continue to work on their self-sponsored writing if in their classes they enjoyed--like really enjoyed--their writing experiences. You imagined that their positive attitudes would carry over (transfer) into less inviting writing situations. They might even keep writing on the sly.

Most of your faculty seem to be taken up by this idea. Like you, they want to enjoy teaching writing. They don't think writing should be painful.

So after a few meetings, you and your teachers decide that affect, a positive attitude toward writing, should be the primary objective of writing instruction in the program .

You're teaching a class in the second semester and you ask your students to write about their histories as writers, their in-class and out-of-class experiences, including their experiences in the first semester writing class of your university.

So they write and when you read their essays, you find they are very explicit about their previous experiences, including their first semester writing experiences.

You are of course happy when they write about their wonderful teachers and writing experiences in Engl 101 (asking them not to use names). You pay attention to why they did--or didn't--like their 101 (and other) writing classes. As they explain which classes were good, you compare the teaching practices they liked to your own; likewise, when they explain which classes sucked and why they sucked, you compare the suck factor to your own practices.

You realize that there might be an authentic assessment model here. Instead of assessing a writing program by having students perform, you have them inform. Rather than have them submit portfolios or what-have-you with school-writing, you ask for serious communication. You ask them to write and explain, sometimes in painful detail, what they learned or didn't learn about writing in their previous classes and how these classes affected their attitudes toward writing and themselves as writers. And then you read their essays and through their eyes, you see yourself.

And then as a writing program director, you imagine this as a common practice: teachers self-assessing by reading about themselves through the lens of other teachers. If they're good teachers, they'll take their students' analyses seriously--not without caution--but seriously. As a WPA, you might even be able to get them together to write about and discuss what they have learned through this self-assessment practice.

If you're a real dreamer, you might even imagine ways of institutionalizing this self-assessment practice and follow-up teaching/writing groups. You imagine ways of tracking changes in student attitude/reports over the years--and in teachers reporting an increase in the pleasure they take in teaching and reading what their students write. You go to bed, happy.