I’m beginning to see how it all fits together–the classroom environment, the shift in focus from work in isolation to work in a global community, the paper load of an English or social studies teacher.  I think Evan Olmstead hit it out of the park with this post:

Teach quality content, model good communication, and guide students as they create their own valuable addition to the discipline at hand.  In this way education may become a place where students are a part of the real world, rather than waiting to enter it.  As educators, we need to recognize this opportunity and use it to change the face of education.  The classroom up until now has been a hypothetical space – let’s make it real.

Let’s make it real.  Yes.  I have wondered for a while now why essays are assigned as summative assessments.  Why do we assume that students, after reading a book once, are suddenly able to become experts on that book?  I’ve read Macbeth a dozen times at least but I still can’t tell you the difference between Lennox and Angus off the top of my head.

More and more, though, I’m thinking about this question: What’s the point of asking students to do research, to engage in literary criticism, or to write persuasively for an audience of one?  There’s nothing more hypothetical than asking a student to write persuasively on the issue of whether or not Huck Finn should be part of the high school curriculum, then giving the essay back with a grade.  If the issue were a real issue, like if our town were thinking about removing the book, or if we were in a curriculum review cycle, “real” people (nonstudents, I guess) would write letters to the editor of the local paper, speak out at Board of Ed meetings, and drop in to visit elected officials and school administrators in their offices.  They would not be graded on the veracity or flow of their arguments, or whether their thesis is clearly stated in both their introduction and conclusion, but real honest-to-God pushback from people who held the opposite view.  There would be an argument, either orally or in written form, and each side would try to inform and convince the other.

Now, of course it’s hard to grade something like that.  And there’s a whole curriculum to cover.  And we can’t go manufacturing controversy.  But what if (and I swear I just thought of this now) this Huck Finn assignment isn’t the end product, but is the beginning of a whole-class discussion on what an English curriculum should include and what its goals should be?

Laura Huertero is wrestling with the fact that individual little grades–homework, quizzes, &c–are pretty much meaningless.  I’d comment on her blog directly, but I don’t have an account.  So I’ll do it here and hope she gets the trackback:

I now see why my esteemed cooperating teacher just made sure that her grades were in the right spot, not that she had graded every tiny thing or that she had squeezed every bit of homework out of every individual that she could.

It just doesn’t matter.

Too often I find myself doing exactly what I swore I’d never do: worrying about the little grades.  I just finished negotiating with a student who owed me seven journal entries about The Great Gatsby.  I was offended by how late he was in his work.  Offended!  But why?  Why did I care?  I found myself losing sight of the big picture (Did Young Sir interact with the book, did he learn anything about literature or life, does he have something to write or talk about that he didn’t have before) and getting bogged down in the check/check plus/check minus hell that I’ve created for myself.  Me.  The guy who, at the meeting about summer reading, tuned out and started writing angry notes to himself in his notebook when it became clear that people were only concerned that a) the students read something over the summer, b) they can’t cheat, and c) they never read the same book twice.  Too many English teachers are control freaks who feel offended when something, anything, isn’t handed in or assessable.  Of course, that probably works for those teachers, and for some of their students.  But there’s got to be another way.