What Do Our Grading Systems Value?

What do grades mean to us? To our students? Are we assigning grades to assess student work, or are the grades sorting the students themselves? Think, for a moment, about how grades work in a typical class. A student does a paper and gets a grade. Does another assignment, gets a grade. Repeat until the end of the semester, average these grades according to some formula, and voila—a final grade!  The students get some kind of report card; they internalize these grades to a greater or lesser extent as a measure of who they are; and everyone moves on to the next thing.

But now let’s imagine that what you want your students to get out of the class (and to take with them as they pursue whatever comes next) is less a rating for how they did with the work of the class and more a set of skills, approaches, and habits of mind that will allow them to thrive in their next work or academic challenges—and might possibly open to them new worlds of pleasure, beauty, and expression?  What if you have a student who begins the term without the kind of background that would allow them to succeed immediately with the work you are assigning, but really turns on as the course progresses and improves so much that their work is largely indistinguishable in quality from the student who came in already knowing everything—even if the already excellent student has progressed?

If the class we were teaching was, say, bicycle riding, we would probably give high marks to all of our students who became competent bicycle riders by the end of the class. If we were teaching lifeguarding, we might not care very much whether the student was able to drag a heavy object from the bottom of the pool on the first try; we would award certification if the student learned the technique that allowed them to lift the object successfully. When practitioners of martial arts earn the right to wear a black belt, no one worries too much about how long it took them to pass each of the tests along the way; the point is that over time the practitioner has mastered all of the required steps to earn the honor.

Typical grading systems in literature classes work in precisely the opposite way, assigning grades to students before they have had a chance to practice the skills and habits of mind we are trying to teach.  Students who are already successful will succeed at each moment of assessment, early or late in the term. But the students who have the most to learn will be penalized early on for their lack of mastery, and these early assessments will linger on until the final grade is tallied. No matter how far these students come, their early struggles will continue to define them as they progress, at least in terms of the final grade.

For a student actively trying to learn and grow, how frustrating to have those early attempts factor in to your final assessment—to be judged for the person you have been, not for who you may become. Thus the typical system of grades accrues into an assessment that not only measures something different from, but actively undermines, the kind of learning most of us want.

Beginner’s Mind

When I was a new teacher, I happened to read that classic 1980s writing manual, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I’ve adapted and often use one of the exercises described in that book—The Samurai—when I am working with students on revision, probably because it’s been very useful for me in my own work.  As its dramatic name suggests, the Samurai exercise encourages us to do a crucial but immensely difficult writing task: take the sword to our own beloved writing and cut the extraneous bits, no matter how attached to our brilliant turns of phrase we have become.  If you can surrender to this mindset, the exercise really does work—but eliminating writing we love, even if we don’t need it anymore, can be painful at best.

But as we have started the semester, I’ve returned to another phrase from this Buddhist-y book, the idea of cultivating something called “beginner’s mind,” with which we encounter even the familiar as something new. Can this work in the literature classroom? Sheridan Blau would argue not only that it can work, but that allowing true beginners—our students—the privilege of a more immediate encounter with a literary text that is unmediated (at least for the moment) by the teacher/expert, is crucial to student engagement and learning.

Certainly, an experienced teacher who really knows a text is in an ideal position to make this kind of student-centered, beginner’s mind learning happen.  We may try to step back from the text to let the students go at it, but we are still there exerting our authority.  And it helps if, as Blau’s students are, the students in question are motivated to succeed academically (if only in terms of grades/teacher approval), even if they already have, as Blau puts it, come to see themselves as failed readers if they do not “get” everything about a text on the first try. Students who see themselves as successful students (even if they see themselves as bad readers or writers) will be motivated to please a teacher like Blau enough, I think, to play along with his methods and give him what he wants.

But what if you are actually a beginning teacher? What if, for you, that beginner’s mind is not something you cultivate in a Buddhist practice kind of way, but the reality of your experience—and something you feel makes you an impostor in the classroom?  It’s one thing for an experienced and vetted college professor, especially one with rank and tenure, to cultivate a beginner’s mind; it’s quite another for a real beginner to do the same—and to do it without any of the safety nets of institutional position or appearance like age, race, or gender that mark those of authority, brilliance, and power in an academic setting.

If we don’t feel we truly have authority, many of us will try to fake it (okay, perform it) trying to dress and otherwise act the part of the role we are trying to learn. Young teachers often find themselves needing to assert a more authoritarian persona—strict rules, adherence to policies, little flexibility—when they feel they have the least authority.  This is so much the norm we could call it developmental. Yet in the same way we might go back to an old diary and cringe at naive insights that seemed so earth-shattering at the time, these authoritarian moments—especially when our persona overwhelms our own humanity—are often the most cringe-worthy of an experienced teacher’s career.

The sad fact is that experience only comes with time.  The happy fact is that beginning teachers can be some of the very best teachers—not because they don’t make mistakes (we all do, no matter how experienced), not because they are closer to many students in age, cultural expertise, or technological platform (although I think these affinities can absolutely be assets in the classroom. Beginning teachers have a special ability to listen, because they haven’t heard it all before. Beginning teachers have a special capacity for empathy, because they are often students themselves. And beginning teachers have a special sense for possibility—because, after all, with a blank slate, anything is possible.

Low-Hanging Fruit

“Big Data” is an idea that seems to be everywhere these days. Whether you believe that relying on big batches of data to tell you the truth is the answer to life’s ills or possibly less helpful than other forms of thoughtful analysis (I refer you to the “surprise” outcomes of the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald J. Trump as US president as moments that point out the limits of big data’s predictive powers), we find ourselves in a moment when we have the technology to find patterns in vast swathes of data—though perhaps we are still learning to read those patterns in productive ways.

Long before big data emerged, a writing teacher named Mina Shaughnessy made an argument that intersects with today’s thinking in interesting ways in her 1977 book Errors and Expectations, now a classic in the field of composition studies. (It’s also a really good read.)  Shaughnessy, who taught what was called “basic writing” to students at City College, then an open admissions college in New York City, began to feel overwhelmed by her students’ mistake-plagued work. Worse, she felt that trying to respond to all of the errors at once was overwhelming—both to her and to the students who would get their papers back covered in red ink (yes, people really used red ink back then!) —and ineffective. In short, she was knocking herself out trying to help her students, but the comments she gave them seemed to make their writing worse.

Not one to shy away from hard work, Shaughnessy’s response was to perform a labor-intensive survey of thousands of placement essays written by entering students at City College and assess the types of errors she found. Her theory was that focusing on patterns of error rather than individual errors would be empowering to students and lead to better writing.  Once student understood their habitual patterns of error, she reasoned, they would be more able to find and eliminate their mistakes as they revised their work.

Shaughnessy’s approach can be empowering and useful for us as teachers of literature (a position which, as we know, makes us de facto teachers of writing as well). We can think with our students about patterns in the texts that we read together, in exercises as simple as “Find every reference to hands/blood/birds in Act III of Macbeth” or “What vowel or consonant sounds occur multiple times in Dickinson’s poem? What different effects do these sounds have when you read the poem aloud? How would you classify these patterns according to the poetry terms we’ve been working on?”  Training students to recognize patterns in texts is a critical skill for reading and for writing about literature—it’s something most of us do as readers without even thinking.

So we should be especially adept at seeing patterns in our students’ work—and if these patterns weaken the writing, Shaughnessy argues, this is where we should start if we want to help them improve.  It’s one thing to mark every comma splice, every misspelled word, every comma outside of a quotation mark, or every paragraph that covers three or four topics instead of focusing on just one. But how much more useful for the student to step back, take a meta view, decide what ONE change would help the student’s writing the most, and make that the focus of your comments.  Helping identify patterns in their work is a gift to any writer who wants to improve; sometimes—even often—we are far too close to our own work to recognize how much better our work could be with some relatively small changes.  Our students are, too—but as skilled readers even beginning teachers are well-positioned to make a large difference.

Teaching and Judging: More on Elbow

“We must teach ourselves and our students to have more than usual privacy in writing; and more than usual publicness.  Conventional teaching is just about as bad as it can be on both counts. Almost no privacy: everything a student writes is read by the teacher, (usually in a judgmental light); it's so bad that students have come to feel bad if you DONT collect what they write: to ask students to write and not collect it, you have to fight their resentment” (50).

This freewrite, or maybe we should call it a free-rant. is from Peter Elbow’s “Toward a Phenomenology of Freewritng,” and I want to use it to open what I hope will be an occasional series of posts on the question of how and why we give feedback on students’ writing. What are we aiming for? How do our assessment techniques help? How do they hurt? What processes or experiences have helped to make us better writers, and how might we us the classroom or our assignments to help foster something similar for our students?

In his essay, Elbow is trying to show how the practice of freewriting can help students access the conditions of writing that, in essence, make good writers. Here, he thinks about a kind of dual-mindset he sees as common among many good writers—a way of writing that is at once intensely private and audience-aware. He talks about this duality in terms of writers’ temperaments (he thinks many great writers deeply value their solitude but also love to perform, to ham it up, to be the center of attention) and habits (the great writers he knows carve out chunks of private time in which to write, yet they are often deeply connected to others). 

But here he is calling attention to a major paradox of the classroom. Good writing has to be, at least in part, intensely private; the classroom, at least traditionally, demands that the student hand in that writing—and not just to have someone read it, but to have someone (the teacher in this case) judge it.  In a sort of Foucaultian dynamic, he claims that students internalize a desire to be judged—to write as if someone is watching even when no observer is present.

Elbow’s answer is to train students to freewrite their way into a greater sense of privacy. Freewriting for him is at least in part a strategy that lays out a kind of judgment free zone in which the student can write through the false starts and junk til they achieve that kind of nirvana-type flow—that fire, that passionate compulsion in which no mode of recording one’s thoughts is fast enough to keep up—that characterizes the best writing moments Elbow and others describe. This is what good writing feels like, he says, and teachers (and the judgment they impose) are more likely to get in the way than to inspire this feeling.

And yet, our job as teachers (at least as teachers of writing, which I would argue we must be if we are to be teachers of literature) is also paradoxical: we want our students to become good writers, yet we also are required to judge them, at least in the form of a final grade, and more often in the form of grades throughout the term.  There are, of course, many ways to grade, to judge, to assess; in future posts I’ll discuss what I see as some pros and cons to some of the systems I have tried in my decades-long attempt to deal productively with this paradox. Most important, I have come to believe, is to set up assignments that are themselves process-oriented, and in which feedback on one assignment (or on a step of a multi-step assignment) can help the student do better work on the next iteration of the assignment. Whether or not grades are involved (more on this in the next post), using assessment to help the student do better in the future is the best  option I have found thus far.

Imagination and Interpretation

I’ve found myself thinking about this comment Justin made in his response,  “I think it is important to teach interpretation as a human, artistic, expressive, act, one that is guided by more than strictures of authority, evidence, reasoning, certainty, etc.”  I agree with this, and I want to think about how the classroom can become a site for this kind of imaginative work.

Part of the answer comes from literature itself—an imaginative form should, by rights, allow for us to unleash our imaginations—isn’t that the pleasure of reading? Last night I was mentioning an article by Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin in Early American Literature that speaks to this issue in a useful and kind of inspiring way. Writing about the propensity among scholars of Early American literature to see texts “essentially as evidence: either indexes to empirical realities or discursive sources of sociopolitical ideologies and identities” (237).  What this looks like in my field is an over- (in my opinion) emphasis on seeing, say, seduction narratives, as mere allegories for aspects of Republican forces and ideas. While this kind of reading has brought certain early American texts into our classrooms, it has rendered others unreadable.  But what if our texts are giving us a different kind of evidence? How do we begin to access the (often very strange) texts’ imaginative aspects in the classroom?

Obviously we need to take more cues from the texts themselves, and allow ourselves to be a little more imaginative in the way that we approach these works of imagination.  As Cahill and Larkin write, “At stake here, of course, is what literature is and does. Does it merely reveal, however richly or inadequately, the historical contexts in which it is produced? Does it participate significantly in the construction of historical reality? Does it enable imaginative speculation—the invention of worlds? And by extension: What is the value of such invented worlds to the historian?  What should it be to the literary scholar?” (242).  Tangling with these questions on the scholarly level is tricky, but I’ll give myself away here and say that as a scholar I am most interested in early American literature’s investment in imagining worlds—buildable, inhabitable worlds—and the novel as a form crucial to bridging the gap between the fictive and the real by allowing readers to practice alternative ways of being that they then might bring to their developing worlds. 

But I’d like to add a question to Cahill and Larkin’s list: What is the value of such invented worlds to the classroom? Later in the essay, the authors claim that “as critics and teachers, we remain committed to the aesthetic interpretation of texts—alert to their wit, profundity, originality, and complexity—for its own sake. This is perhaps especially true for early American writing in all its strangeness, ungainliness, fragmentariness, anxiety, and paranoia” (245). But they don’t offer a whole lot of clues about how this commitment translates into what Elbow might call a phenomenology of invention, or maybe of imagination, in the classroom.  So I suppose that makes it our job to figure out what this kind of imaginative practice looks and feels like.

One problem is that even as we aim for inventiveness and productive imagination in the classroom, we get so stuck in our interpretive holes (but also the hole of the classroom, which comes with so many layers of expectation and anxiety about behaviors and performance that it can be hard to make it a space for creativity, expression, and joy.

But the best classrooms do just that.  We got a few clues for how we as teachers can try to facilitate such a mindset in some of your responses to last week’s readings. A few thoughts come to mind—please remind me of others in the comments or by email.

1.     Model creative engagement.  We saw from your responses that as students you are especially responsive to teachers who think outside (sometimes way outside) the box.  The obvious corollary is that as teachers we need to find ways to tap into our own creativity in the classroom. This creativity may come in the form of assignments, syllabus design, classroom activities, or a teacherly persona (or all of the above!). The point is, students are more willing to go “out there” to join a teacher who’s already gone beyond convention.

2.     Model joy. Hokey. Cheesy. Too bad. I think it’s really hard to expect students to enjoy literary study if the teacher seems to hate it. Enough said.

3.     Encourage expression. Think about the quotes from Halla’s supervising professor, Len von Morzé, that we put on the board (and can someone remind me that I want to take pictures of the board to put on the blog?) last night. “Interesting. Where do you see that in the text?” and “That’s not how I read it—did anyone else read it this way?” We talked about students wanting to see whether the teacher’s eyes betrayed a sense of right or wrong answer; I think the best teachers tend to want to hear all the responses students present, even ones that are a bit off the wall. Our job is to listen for the interesting ideas and to help students develop them. If we screen out answers that we weren’t expecting to hear, we risk both missing the most potentially interesting directions for conversation and we tacitly tell students to shut up, now and in future. Not good.

4.     Go all in. Remind students that these habits of mind aren’t simply pleasurable (although they are, and we would be wise to appreciate the importance of finding pleasure in our work). Creative engagement underlies all of the best scholarly work in the field. You don’t get that Arden edition footnote for doing what everybody else is doing, or thinking what everybody else is thinking.  You cultivate your ability to throw yourself into the work, to go a little nutty, to ask the crazy question, and then to do the work to figure out whether the crazy question in fact has the potential to illuminate the work anew for those who thought they knew it well.   If we are willing to go for it, it’s more likely our students will be—and at least (we hope) they’ll come to class to see what will happen next.

Cahill, Edward and Edward Larkin, “Aesthetics, Feeling and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” Early American Literature 51:2 (2016): 235-254.

Can Care be Taught?

I’ve been thinking about a line from Peter Elbow’s article, “Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting.” Freewriting to get to the sense of what good writers do, he hits on the idea of double audience—that good writers write for themselves AND for an audience.  Musing on the differences between public and private writing, he writes, in the capital letters he uses when typing up an exciting idea, “SO HERE AGAIN, WE HAVE AN ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX BEHAVIOR, PERFORMANCE, SKILL: WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT AND COMPLEX AND SUBJECT TO ARGUMENT IS THAT IT CONSISTS OF ESSENTIAL PARADOX. A GOOD WRITER IS SOMEONE WHO IS MORE THAN USUALLY PRIVATE AND WRIITNG ONLY TO SELF YET AT THE SAME TIME MORE THAN USUALLY SHOWOFFY AND PUBLIC AND GRANDSTANDING AND SELFPANDERING” (50).

A few lines later we get the big reveal—a nugget that we know will become one of Elbow’s significant contributions to the field. “BUT REALLY WHAT LOOKS LIKE AN ANOMALY IS REALLY CHARACTERISTIC THE MAIN THING—RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF WRIITNG OR AT LEAST GOOD WRITING” (50).

One thing I love about this part of his essay is the sense of process Elbow conveys. He is making an argument that the best writers become that way by (guess what) writing. And by letting us see ideas developing in his own freewriting, he lets us witness this process happening for him. I also love that Elbow shows us freewriting where the ideas don’t happen; obviously not every 10-minute writing session is going to yield equally brilliant results!

We talked in class about some of our lofty goals in teaching, and the question was raised—can we teach students to care?  I think that depends on what we mean by teaching and learning. If caring is something that can only come from within a student, then a model of teaching that sees itself as imposing what we care about on our students and judging them on how much they seem to care about what we care about (or at least on how well they pretend to care) is doomed to failure.

What’s exciting about Elbow’s model of freewriting to me is how much care this very simple practice—this simple act of writing—seems to engender among its participants.   Elbow, in fact, talks about the students caring too much—so much that all they want to do is talk about their freewriting, even in situations where Elbow has other things planned for class.

So where does this leave us with regards to teaching literature? The closest parallel to Elbow’s model I can think of happens in elementary school classrooms when the teacher gives the class time to read whatever they choose. Simply reading, the theory goes, will make us better readers. But when we teach literature, we read texts in common—often texts that the teacher him or herself hasn’t chosen. And if we want students not just to read but to think, discuss, write, and even care, then we need to find processes, practices, acts that we can ask students to do—not to abdicate responsibility or to devalue content but in fact to engender the kind of care and investment in literature that we (at heart) want our students not just to exhibit, but to feel.