Can you believe the professor let him say that?

or

What if student comments are way off base?

An interesting question keeps arising in our conversations about running class discussion in an open and generative, as opposed to a task-oriented way: what do you do with a student comment that’s way off base—or even wrong?

(Disclaimer: This entry is not going to deal with responses that are bigoted or offensive in nature. That’s for another day.)

First, let me confess that, while I don’t believe that there are no wrong answers, I think that if the discussion question is truly open—as in, “I never really know what to do with this passage in The Scarlet Letter, and I’d love to talk about it together to see if we get farther together than I did on my own,”—then there are so many possibly right (or at least potentially interesting) answers that it would be hard for a student to be absolutely wrong.

Given the anxiety many students feel about speaking in class at all, it seems far more likely that the student hasn’t fully formulated his or her thought, or that the wrong-seeming response betrays a deeper misunderstanding of the text, than that the student is being wrong on purpose. Far better in the first case for the instructor to try to draw the student out more completely so that the response becomes comprehensible—and perhaps in the process more interesting, useful, or even illuminating.  Asking a student to rephrase or “say more about that,” turning the question to the class to see if others share the view, or perhaps asking the class to think about where in the text might there be evidence to support the surprising contention you’ve all just heard are all ways to allow an unexpected answer to become the most exciting part of a class.

As the old saw goes: the more you learn, the less you know—so it may in fact be easier for more experienced instructors to let go enough of their own ideas about a text to go to a new, if odd and surprising, place with it. But this requires us to believe a few important things: first, that the text can yield itself in vastly different ways to different readers, and that the excitement of reading with others is expanding what we already know, think, or feel about a text.  It requires us to be clear in our minds, as Curzan and Damour remind us, about the difference between a real discussion and a task-based conversation, in which there really are right or wrong answers, and where the point of the class conversation is to have the students actively coming to these answers themselves rather than quietly taking notes while the instructor lectures.

Becoming open to unexpected responses also requires us to believe that interpreting literary texts is a skill—or even an art—that gets better with practice. We wouldn’t expect a beginning biology student to be expert at lab skills before taking a class; we wouldn’t expect dancers to know all of the steps before taking the floor.  Sure, some people have naturally steadier hands with the pipette, and other fortunate people have an innate sense of rhythm. But they still need to practice, and so do our students.  And learners need to have a place where they can make mistakes and not be made to feel like the skill in question—in this case, finding pleasure in coming to a deeper understanding of a literary text and sharing that insight with other interested people—is off-limits to them. I think the literature classroom should be just such a place.

Asking for Something Ridiculous

Last night, our model lesson was ridiculous.  I’m not being judgmental here; we were asked to bring two disparate literary works—a fairly straightforward poem by Philip Levine and a freewheeling postmodern dialogue by Donald Barthelme—together to illuminate one another. We were also given a set of rules to govern our work. One of the rules was that our response had to be ridiculous, nonsensical, ludicrous—kind of crazy. 

At first it seemed like the exercise might flop. The class was quiet, perplexed. People stared at the rules as if they would shed any light on the task we were to perform. Though we were given the option to work with a partner or group, everyone quietly focused, alone, on the task at hand, wrestling with a request we did not fully understand from a teacher whom we wanted to succeed.  And when we looked up ten minutes later, we were eager to share our ridiculous analyses and excited about what we been able to do with this unfamiliar assignment. The atmosphere of the classroom was engaged, energized, fun.

When we talked about our responses to the assignment after it was over, we all reported feeling skeptical, resistant, and even overtly hostile toward the assignment. We’re all good students trained to approach literature seriously, and no one, it seems, wanted to mix literary analysis and ridiculousness.  And yet, good students that we are, we all settled into the task, and when we did, we found that we learned far more from the assignment than we ever expected we would—far more, perhaps, than if we had done something more traditional.  All of us reported that the exercise made us see more in the original poem than we had when we used our usual methods of reading, and I think it’s fair to say that we found the activity itself exciting once we just went with it and threw ourselves into the work.

During our debrief, someone suggested that this activity might work well with less advanced students, students, that is, whose expectations for a class on poetry were less set in concrete, and that might well be true. But what the experience got me thinking about was how ridiculous some of the analytical tasks we assign—or the exercises we come up with to help students heighten their understanding of different aspects of literary texts—must seem to students when they first encounter our requests.

I’m not thinking here of particularly outside-the-box assignments; I’m thinking of the basic tasks of our field: annotating a passage; seeing patterns of language in a text; seeing how the details we notice help us to build an extended analysis.  When we ask students to do these tasks, we can be reasonably sure that some of them will be familiar with what we are asking, and will complete the task assigned. But how many others might see the instructions to an annotation assignment as truly bizarre? And yet, if they trust the instructor, students are likely to try to follow the assignment’s request and grapple with the unfamiliar task. 

And when they do, perhaps we need to be able to meet these efforts with the same spirit we met one another’s crazy responses to the poetry assignment—with pleasure, encouragement, applause. We did a strange task; we were brave enough to share our wild responses, and, most importantly, I think, we agreed that the assignment had broken through our usual responses and made us think anew. With students whose skills at literary analysis are less polished, shouldn’t we meet their efforts to do the ridiculous things we ask them to do with the same spirit?

Only by risking ourselves creatively and intellectually will we grow. This is true for us; it’s true for our students as well. But it’s much more fun and productive to take those risks in an environment where even our first fumbling attempts are seen as steps toward intellectual growth rather than as a dispiriting measure of how far we have to go.

Teaching vs. Sorting

If a student’s intellect can’t be measured with a number—or a letter—then what can grades do? What are they for? Clearly they are an attempt to account for something—how well a student has completed an assigned task; how much information they have successfully regurgitated on demand; how well they have been able to apply equations or theorems or analytical tools to unfamiliar data.  The student performs, and the teacher assesses. End of grading story.

Except we all know that it’s not the end of the story, but rather the beginning of the way in which grades begin to iron out individuality and sort students into categories, a process with negative consequences for teaching and learning.  What happens after the grade has been applied and digested by the teacher and by the student?

When a student receives a grade, their reaction to it will depend in part on how the assessment fits into or diverges from their prior experiences.  If the student is accustomed to receiving high grades and gets an A, great. Sort of. All is as it should be and the student continues to do whatever he or she has always done to succeed, not reflecting on the process until years later (if they happen to become a teacher) or perhaps never reflecting upon it at all. If a student accustomed to lackluster grades gets yet another, what would inspire them to think they might be capable of more? A student used to high marks can find a low mark so upsetting that the grade itself is all they can remember from the course (I’m guilty of this one in my own student life). A student used to low marks who receives a higher-than-expected grade may feel either that it’s anomalous, that the teacher has made a mistake or, indeed, that the teacher him or herself is not smart enough to know what kind of (bad) student he or she is dealing with.

As a teaching assistant in graduate school, I can remember being told in an early TA training session not to be afraid that students would get upset about earning, say, a C on a composition essay. “You all,” the trainer told us, “are A students. You’re used to getting As. Believe me, a C for them isn’t nearly as upsetting as a C would be for you.”  Sadly, she was at least a little bit right.

But the trainer’s comment points to the bigger problem I’ve found with grading individual assignments: grading tends to make me sort students into types. A students, B students, C students, the hopeless—even from very early assignments.  This gets back to an issue I’ve discussed before: the A students already know how to succeed in the work of the class, yet the classroom should still be a place where they are challenged to learn and grow. The others get lumped in groups from which, mathematically, they may never emerge, no matter how amazing their later work becomes.

When I am grading a big stack of papers and come across one from a student that I already know will write a terrific paper, I will slide it lower in the stack as something to look forward to as I slog through the pile. But my favorite grading moments are when I stumble upon a terrific response from an unexpected voice—one I had previously classified as unlikely to produce much of interest. Philosophically, I believe that most people are capable of producing excellent work, but practically, I confess that grading seems to make even the possibility of growth all the more elusive.

What if Everybody’s Excellent?

Years ago, a friend of mine was working on a book about Maria Mitchell, the nineteenth-century astronomer who discovered a comet as a young woman and is generally acknowledged as America’s first great female scientist.

Mitchell got into teaching by accident. When she heard in 1862 that Matthew Vassar was going to open a college for women, she wrote to ask whether he needed a professor of astronomy.  She was asking on behalf of her brother-in-law, but Vassar misunderstood and interviewed Mitchell for the job. Mitchell’s grading philosophy was simple: as a scientist she did not believe that people’s minds were units that could be evaluated numerically, as Vassar students were at the time. When the college administration required her to assign grades, she decided to give every student the top grade: a 5. Why? Mitchell argued, “If a girl has faithfully studied her lesson and does not know it, she deserves 5 for her industry. If she has not studied, yet knows it, she deserves 5 for her intellect. If she has neither studied nor knows it, she deserves 5 for her audacity incoming before me!” (Bergland 194). 

I read many versions of this book while it was in progress, and this line has stuck with me ever since.  I agree with Mitchell that the project of assigning a number to a student’s intellectual work, whether on an individual assignment or for a semester’s worth of growth, simply makes no logical sense.  And what a relief it would be, I thought, at the end of a long semester, to fill out an entire grade roster with As for every student! 

Mitchell personalized her 5s by writing funny poems for each student at the end of the term, a project that probably took her longer than averaging a bunch of numbers would have (after all, astronomers in those days needed to be crack mathematicians in order to do the calculations that proved their assertions about bodies in distant space), but must also have been much more fun, both for Mitchell and for the students who received them in a celebration at the end of the term. The poems allowed her to respond to each student as an individual, to recognize what each one had brought to the class, and to assess, in a manner that stayed with her students far longer than any mere 5 would have, the intellectual effort and growth the student had experienced while in Mitchell’s class.

I’m not suggesting that we all go out and write poems to our students; besides, the grading programs we use wouldn’t exactly accept verse instead of letter grades!  But I’m inspired by Mitchell to think about what would happen if we followed her lead: developed strong relationships with students that allowed us to understand them as individuals instead of a group for us to rate and sort; gave students credit for coming to our intellectual work with open and eager attitudes; recognized their desire to work and learn instead of seeing them as shirkers trying to get away with the least effort possible. What would change for students if they understood that they mattered to a teacher not as a number, but as a person?

Work Cited

Renée Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).