Squirrels in the Springtime

"...our observations of the grading phenomenon in writing classes echo those of researcher Paul Diederich, who says that the classes he visits are 'fantastically over-evaluated,' with teachers 'piling [grades] up like squirrels gathering nuts.'" (page 182)

~Dornan et al. (2003). Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom. Pearson Education Group, Inc.: Boston.

I absolutely love this quote. It evokes so many images in my mind. First, I imagine Kelly Gallagher carrying the boxes and boxes of student journals to his car when he assigned journals. I imagine the teacher at Caribou hanging out with me at 10pm on Friday night while she graded student essays. I imagine us in about two months as we cope with the first inundation of grading student papers/projects. And I imagine the students who toss said papers/projects into their lockers, never to be seen again.

Initially, I disagreed with authors' stance that only a fraction of writing assignments should be graded. Generally, I do not like to write and would be--okay, am--one of those students who do not put any effort into the in-class, on-your-own, not-for-credit writing assignments. So, I was thinking that my students would also slack off on writing assignments if they knew that they were not to be graded. And then the light bulb came on.

It is okay to slack off sometimes! Wait, that doesn't sound quite right, at least not coming from a teacher. Let me try again: We should allow room for students to struggle, relax, or really get fired up about writing. No person can produce consistent, quality work on anything. We all ebb and flow with our output. Looking back, even though I despised the freewriting time during my undergraduate creative writing class, a few of those pieces evolved into a portfolio-worthy product. Not everything was graded and I didn't always put in a lot of effort, and that was okay. That is what the writing process is all about. Alas, my guilt over writing about my irritation with the class during all of those freewrites has subsided.

Now, let's bring this back to my original quote: not everything needs to be graded. We do not need to feel like terrible teachers if the trunks of our cars are not weighted down with student work each and every weekend. While there will be some students (like me) who do not try hard because they know that the writing will not be graded, there will be others (like Paw from the ELL book?) who write more because it is not assessed.

Resource link: This is a lesson plan from http://www.readwritethink.org/ about using a multigenre approach for making personal connections with literature. This seems to be a summation of the concerns addressed last week during our group's presentation as well as the desire to bring in personal connections and reader-response to our assignments. This particular lesson plan focuses on using hypertext--or digital--mediums, but I think that it could be applied to a paper-based project as well. Here it is: http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=782