Rubrics And Risk

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            “Frankly, I’m amazed by the number of educators whose opposition to standardized tests and standardized curricula mysteriously fails to extend to standardized in-class assessments.” 

            That’s Alfie Kohn in 2006, in what’s become one of the best known critiques of rubrics.

            I am not as harsh a critic of rubrics as Kohn is.  But I am inclined, like Chris Gallagher, to prefer descriptive rubrics, student-created rubrics, or individualized rubrics designed collaborately between teacher and student that are specific to each assignment.

            But I like Kohn’s point about standardization, which I think is even more relevant now than it was when he wrote that article.  Collectively, we are so resistant to standardized testing and standardized evaluation of our teaching, but then why are we comfortable with standardized rubrics?

            This makes me think of some recent articles I read in Slate and Smithsonian about creativity and risk-aversion.  Both articles were in response to a study that showed how hostile most people were to creativity, even though we give it a lot of superficial praise.  One of the articles also mentioned studies in risk-aversion that show that teachers are the most risk-averse professionals.

            Not that this is surprising given the scrutiny and vitriol teachers have been subjected to, especially in the last several years.

            But at some point we all do have to take some risks and thereby reclaim our profession, even if these risks are small scale endeavors like individualizing a school-wide or departmental rubric. 

            I used to subvert my district’s demands for standardization all the time.  Once we had a principal who was determined to raise CAPT scores by requiring monthly CAPT assessments.  And to make sure we all complied, these were to be submitted to our department head each month and then passed along to the principal for review, which he would then send to central office.

            I knew nobody was looking at these things.  Just to test my theory, I created a CAPT activity for a mythology unit for freshmen.  Mind you, no student EVER saw this assessment.  This was created and submitted for the sole purpose of testing my theory that this requirement was just an exercise in CYA and/or arbitrary assertion of authority for authority’s sake. 

            Remember the old CAPT Response to Literature questions?  What is your initial reaction to this story?  Has anything like this ever happened to you?  Make a connection to another story.  Respond to this quote.  Define good literature and evaluate this story according to your definition.  I created a CAPT activity for a unit on Oedipus.  I wrote questions like, Have you ever felt incestuous desire for your mother or murderous feelings toward your father?  Explain why or why not. 

You get the idea.

            At the end of the month, I submitted my CAPT activity as required, and never heard a peep out of anyone.  It’s probably still on file somewhere.

            I did similar things, like submit departmental rubrics with student artifacts that I never shared with students.  My students got written and mulut feedback throughout the drafting process and then a full page at the end which described each essay’s strengths and weaknesses.  The list of canned descriptors with boxes next to them I reserved for the same file cabinets that held the CAPT practice exercises.

            I also refused to use the number codes on the progress reports and report cards, and instead wrote even just a short note for each student—much to the chagrin of some colleagues, though I knew of others who did the same thing.

            My point in these acts of subversion was twofold.  One, I wanted to resist the push to quantify and standardize (and dehumanize) teaching, especially assessment.  And two, I wanted to show that the emperor wore no clothes.  These mandates had limited or no pedagogical value, yet most teachers complied out of fear of reprisal.

            This is not to suggest teachers should do something quite as risky as some of the things I did, but perhaps we can push the envelope a little bit here and there?

            I used to enjoy creating assignments with my high school students.  At the end of a unit, Friday’s homework would be to come in with six ideas for paper topics.  We’d workshop these in groups till we had a set the class liked, and then we’d repeat the same process for the rubric.  The end result was that the students had ownership of the assignment and insider knowledge of its assessment.

            Was that too risky?

           

Screen Free Week

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            We have fights in our home about screen time and Minecraft, but on the whole our kids don’t spend too much time on screens.  (Amy would prefer even less, but she grew up watching almost no TV except Little House on the Prairie).  But between Screen Free Week this week and the gradual return of daylight (if not warmth), it’s been nice to see our kids spending so much time outdoors or with their noses buried in books.

            Elsa began spring soccer last week.  Practices are Tuesday and Thursday late afternoons, so it’s been a little chilly.  Amy brings her to practice because I teach till 4:45, but I go pick her up.  This past Tuesday was sunny and relatively warm, so I sat in the bleachers beneath big white clouds moving swiftly across the sky, and more or less read my new book, The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the Pulitzer in 2013.  I looked around at the green grass of the field and the light red touches on the tips of the tree branches and it seemed almost impossible that a month ago it would have been dark and snow still covered the ground.

            When I came home this evening, Cormac and our tenant’s kids were riding bicycles in circles in the driveway while Elsa sat on the edge and wrote in a book she just picked up at the Book Fair called The Totally Tea-RRIFIC Hat-Tastic Book All About You.  I told her I’d get her a couple books at the end of the week, but she smuggled her Spend Jar into school today, hidden in the bottom of her backpack, because she couldn’t wait.  She bought that book, and a journal with a lock, and a book about sports, because she’s all into being a jock lately (while her brother is all into being a nerd).

            This evening Amy had to rush back to school for the World Language Department’s Awards Ceremony.  So I spent the early evening sitting at our countertop with the door to the porch open, supervising the kids as they did their homework.  Then I rounded them up while it was still light and we took a walk down our street to the Fenton River.  We have Joshua’s Trust Nature Preserve all along the opposite side of our road and then a field, an old mill and mill pond, and a stone bridge at the bottom of the hill.  Elsa and Cormac walked along the top of the bridge wall to the mill side, and then Elsa walked beneath the bridge so she could belt out “Your Song” and listen to her own voice echo out from below and across the water.

            We got back to the house just as evening descended upon our little valley, and I let Elsa onto the computer so she could write a goodbye poem to Miss Riley, a student teacher from UConn who’s been in her class this semester.  She’s been running Writing Workshop in Elsa’s class, and Elsa has become really fond of her and will miss her.  All my advisees have been telling me about their students crying on their last days this week.  I don’t know that Elsa would let herself cry but she feels strongly enough to want to write a poem.

            Cormac immediately sequestered himself in his room to dive into Treasure Island, which he started just this past Monday.  He’s been on a pirate kick since we let him watch the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  He finished Pearls of Lustra on Sunday (from the Redwall series) and wanted a new book, so he and I pored over the books on his shelves to see what he had NOT read yet, and made a small stack.  As soon as I placed Stevenson’s novel on the pile, he grabbed it.  He’ll read that till after Elsa goes to bed.  I would read to Elsa from Masterpiece, which is about a cockroach who can paint like Dürer, but she seems to have misplaced the book, so we will have to go with something else for now, maybe The Cloud Searchers, which is book three in the Amulet graphic novel series.  She just got that for Easter.

After Elsa and Amy are asleep, Cormac and I will pick up The Return of the King and resume where we left off, with Gondor just coming under siege and Gandalf worrying about Frodo’s journey to Cirith Ungol.

            Once I can get Cormac to bed, I’ll pour a glass of wine and stay up too late reading more of my book.  (But despite Screen Free Week and since it’s still too cold to sit on the porch at night, I might sneak a peak at the NBA playoffs.  I think the Memphis-Portland game should still be on.  Just don’t tell my kids).

           

Appreciation For Two Mentors On Teacher Appreciation Week

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Last week was the selesai week in schools for the student teachers and graduate student interns.  Elsa had a young woman named Sara Riley in her second grade class this semester who ran writing workshop.  Elsa adored Miss Riley, and upon Sara’s departure, Elsa wrote her a very sweet letter.

Here’s an excerpt: 

“Dear Ms. Riley, Thank You For Everything You’ve Done For Our Class And Our teachers. … You Are One Of Those People Evreybody Can Trust All The Time—A Sweet, Wise Person (And Beatiful !) … Sara Riley A Beatiful Wonderful Name Sara Riley And I Don’t Want To Let Go Of That Lovley Name And Person. I Don’t Want IT To Be Tomarow But That’s The Way it’s gonna go So You Can Lead Your Life and We’ll All Be Crying To This One Crazy, Beatiful, Lovley, Sweet, Funny, Loving Lady Named Sara Riley. … Thank You The Most For Being My And Our Teacher.

Bye-Bye

Love Your Sweet Student

Elsa Nocton

P.S. … I Wrote This All Bye Myself In One Night No Help!!”

I didn’t get any notes quite that effusive, but I did get two thank you cards—complete with $10 gift cards for coffee!—from two former students, one who will be in the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates beginning this summer and one who will be entering a graduate aktivitas to become a school counselor.

Isn’t it amazing how a simple thank you and a $10 gift card can make your whole week?

Since this is both Teacher Appreciation Week and the selesai week of the college semester, I have been thinking about some good friends and colleagues who are retiring this year.  I’d like to mention two who have been especially good friends and colleagues to me.

One is Lynn Bloom.  Anyone who has attended a Summer Institute at UConn knows Lynn.  She was the first person to hold the position of Endowed Aetna Chair, starting in the late 80s.  Lynn spends a day with the teachers every summer, where she shares her writing and her life story, which is always inspirational to the many women who attend the SI.  And often teachers have subsequently enrolled as non-degree students in Lynn’s Creative Nonfiction classes. 

Besides being a tireless champion of the writing project, Lynn has been a true mentor and mensch to me professionally and personally.  She introduced me to Patrick Sullivan of Manchester Community College, and this meeting resulted in my first published book chapter.  I will likely have another chapter published in a book edited by Patrick this coming academic year.  Lynn also introduced Amy and me to some friends of hers who were retiring and looking to rent their home. Ultimately, after a couple of years, we bought that house, which is where we live now.

The other good friend and colleague of mine who is retiring this year is Ken Giella, who for many years has taught art and been the art department head at RHAM High School, where I began my teaching career.  When I started at RHAM in 1995, I was advising both the school newspaper and the literary magazine.  I had many long days and late nights at RHAM (not helped by the fact that I was commuting between Simsbury and Hebron!).  Ken was running the yearbook, so often he and I and the janitors were the only adults still in the building at 5 and 6 and 7 in the evening.  Ken always gave me good advice and made me laugh. 

Whenever I would get frustrated with the students for skipping meetings or missing deadlines, Ken would say, “The adults are worse!”  And he was right, which I learned very clearly the year I chaired a NEASC Mission Statement Committee.  God how the teachers on that committee would complain about having to write a paragraph.  And who didn’t have anything to write with or write on.  One teacher submitted a paragraph to me written in red pencil on a torn-off scrap of newspaper.

Like Lynn, Ken was also a real friend and mentor.  He owned a house built in 1720 and had spent a couple decades restoring it.  When Amy and I bought our first house, built in 1835, Ken spent many hours helping me do repairs, typically for no more payment than a great dinner and a couple beers.  I learned much from Ken about teaching, about human nature (that of teachers and students alike), and about home ownership.

Both Lynn and Ken always knew and showed by example that good teaching had everything to do with human relationships, and I’m thankful both have been friends and mentors to me.

New Opportunities For A New School Year

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            Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” referring to the shift toward Modernism.

            I’m not going to make nearly so grandiose a pronouncement, but we enter this new school year with many changes—some of them dramatic—to the educational landscape, especially here in Connecticut but also across the US.

            For one thing, we have a new Commissioner of Education, Dianna Wentzell, who, although she served under Stefan Pryor in the Malloy administration, does have the advantage of having actually been an educator.  In fact, she spent more than a decade teaching, and even taught in an urban district. 

It’s unfortunate that widely supported legislation to make teaching experience a requirement for the position of Commissioner of Education was vetoed by Governor Malloy and that the democrats in the legislature lacked the political will and courage to override his veto, but this is at least a start and perhaps sets (or re-establishes) a animo for future administrations.

            Connecticut has also been given approval by the US Department of Education to jettison the new (and expensive and controversial) SBAC test for eleventh graders, and instead will be allowed to use the SAT.  Furthermore, the state will be picking up the tab for everyone to take the SAT, as it had done for the SBAC and the CAPT before this.

            And of course the SBAC results were finally released, offering nothing we didn’t already know.  Students in wealthy districts did fairly well; students in high need districts did not do as well.  Now comes the push back to reduce the testing from yearly in grades three through eight to every other year.

            The USDE also approved a school rating system for Connecticut that factors in more than just test scores.  The new system is not without controversy or objection, particularly to its five point system that many fear will look too much like an A through F grade scale, but at the very least the new system will take into account factors including attendance, physical fitness, and access to the arts, among others.

            In the meantime, the teacher evaluation system (SEED) enters its second year of a two-year moratorium on the use of state test data while the SDE figures out what changes to make to its initial plan.  Still no word, however, on what will replace the old CEU system!  Just a few years ago, I renewed my 7-12 certification (I maintained it even though I am at UConn) and it was just some paperwork to fill out, nothing more.

            On the national level, we look to finally be inching toward reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which would finally eliminate some of the onerous provisions of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind version of ESEA, and which might also send the Obama-administration’s Race To the Top aktivitas riding off into the sunset. 

The Senate has approved a reauthorization bill called the Every Child Achieves Act, and the House has passed a similar bill called the Student Success Act.  These two bills still have to be reconciled and signed into law, but the prospects for passage look good.  The ECAA is particularly responsive to the wishes of most educators.  For one thing, it replaces AYP with a version of something the NEA calls an Opportunity Dashboard, which includes factors like access to the arts and phys ed, the presence of counselors and nurses, advanced course offerings, and the like.  (It’s consistent with the new school rating system the USDE approved for CT).  It also rejects additional funding for vouchers, and several amendments to try to embed vouchers in the new bill were voted down.

Here at UConn, as you may have read, we have the largest freshman class ever, which includes a dramatic increase in various populations of students, including 140 valedictorians and salutatorians admitted into the ever-growing honors program, and many, many more international students.

As a result of this increase in international students, my wife Amy and I are working together again for the first time in nine years. She’s teaching English for Non-Native Speakers as an adjunct professor and has a class of students from China and Korea.

On a much smaller scale, I’m excited that after nine years in the CWP’s office suite (a generous description!) I finally got new shelving and a desk and chair for the combination supply closet/library/copy center/kitchenette, which dramatically cleans up the area and makes more work space for my bevy of interns and the CWP’s new graduate assistant. 

We made room for Amy, too.

Best wishes to everyone for a productive year!

The Habit Of Reading

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When I was an undergraduate, I loved being an English major because I could do my school work just by taking a novel and going to read it outside somewhere.  I had a few favorite spots, like the courtyard outside the Benton Museum with its tall oaks, fountain, and statue of Bacchus, or this hidden courtyard outside the Young Building which always smelled of the katsura trees planted there.

In grad school in California, there were several great coffee shops where I used to love to read, especially this place called Café Mokka.  I’d drink way too much coffee, read, and write letters to people back east.

In the early years of my teaching career, I used to assign tasks to myself, mostly to fill in gaps.  One winter I read all the Shakespeare plays I had never read, about twenty-five in all, even Cymbeline and Coriolanus.

Later, I created an elective called the Contemporary American Novel, and spent the whole summer reading contemporary fiction in order to prepare to teach the course, and then had to repeat that each summer to stay current, which was a stroke of genius.

Then I went back to grad school while teaching, and then I got my current administrative job, and gradually I read less and less for pleasure, till a few years ago I realized that, although I was always reading, I rarely read for pleasure anymore.  So I made a goal to read for just thirty minutes every day.  For me, this was usually late at night, after everyone had gone to bed.

I read pretty fast.  If I am reading for pleasure, I can read a page a minute, so by my calculations, thirty minutes a day should have produced about 210 pages a week.  The first year I did this, I read 39 books, or about a book every week and a half.

Then I taught this new course I designed called Why Read? and I had a young woman in the class who had read 78 books for pleasure during the previous year.  That stoked my competitiveness, and so I set a goal for this past year to exceed her mark, which would require about a book and a half every week.

In the end, I read 95 books this past year.  That’s almost two a week.  Granted, some were Young Adult novels like Weasel or The Acorn People that were around 100 pages, but I also read DeLillo’s Underworld and Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weigh in at 827 and 773 pages, respectively.

In re-establishing my reading habits, I found it helpful not only to designate a specific time and place for reading, but to go back to my old practice of reading books in specific groupings.  So I read Cormac McCarthy’s first four novels and Toni Morrison’s last four, and I went on a Neil Gaiman kick for a while, then John Greene, then Junot Díaz, Andre Dubus, Khaled Hosseini, and Jeannette Walls. 

I read the last six winners of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the last four winners of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.  I read books I was embarrassed to have never read yet, like Night and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I filled in gaps, like Hawthorne’s children’s tales. 

Sometimes I broke it up with literary biography, like Rebel Souls, which is about Whitman, or The Life of a Prodigal, which is about Julian Hawthorne, and contemporary memoir like Vertigo, Blackout, and A Wolf at the Table.

I also began to make time for more professional reading, usually on Friday afternoons, right before I left work for home.  Again, just thirty minutes every Friday afternoon, and over the course of the year I was able to finish new books by Jeff Wilhelm, Tom Newkirk, Nancie Atwell, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Dana Goldstein, Dan Willingham, and Maja Wilson.

I’m motivated to point this out because when I survey my students, they all tell me how work and school work, social life, social media, quality TV, and other demands and distractions have drawn them away from pleasure reading—which to a one they all profess to have loved as younger children.

I don’t scoff at them.  I had been there too:  too busy to read and then too tired and then too enticed by TV and social media.  It took a conscious effort to break my new bad habits and re-establish good ones.  It’s worth having the conversation with our students, and modeling how.