Home Stretch

It's May.  Almost June.  Just a few more...  Anyway, let's skip the formalities and get right to the sentences this time.  As always, these are from student work, and my comments are in (   ).

- Subconsciously she has been creeping every night.

- The wallpaper woman is being help captive.

- At night she crawls around the room on all floors.

- (This was the title of a paper.)  Character Characteristics of the Characters of "Stalking"

- In the violet death of her adversary...  (I have always pictured death as more red than violet.)

- All the attention she has been longing for is now bottling up inside of her.

- Gretchen's beliefs help with the overall theme of the story.  (Those themes need all the help they can get, I guess.)

- She dreamed of killing villains and riding her horse off into the sun.  (Ouch?)

- (On a vocabulary quiz.)  vagrant = strong in smell  (Well, they often are, but...)

- In the passed...

- Her husband takes on the societal role of a perogative doctor.  (My prerogative doctor won't let me get a second opinion.)

- The choir dressed in long black ropes.

- ...the author goes on to give off symboliziom.  (Is that on the Periodic Table?)

- They were indeed placing a form of violence upon Dummy.

- There are many vivid deceptions of people.

- She believes that white people have more money and are, therefore in a higher social class.  (This is more a fact than a matter of belief, no?  If you have money, you are... never mind.)

- Her father just viewed her as his left hand man.  (He must have been a lefty.)

- This allows the creation of a perspective the reader has about the main idea when he or she reads the story.  (Did you get any of that?)

- She was beginning to feel a girly state.  (No comment...)

That's it for this round.

J

On the Fallacy of Grades

I could say a lot on this topic, but I would like to offer a short and simple example of how the idea that we can actually grade learning and real thought is laughably ridiculous.  I assigned my College English students to read two sonnets by Shakespeare, numbers 18 and 130.  Sonnet 18 begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and is all about how amazingly beautiful the woman is.  Sonnet 130 begins, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and describes how unattractive his mistress is, but ends, "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare."  That day I put on the board this "Quiz" question with no stipulation as to length or format:

Ladies: Which poem would you rather have written about you?
Gents: Which poem would you give to your lady?
Explain.

The following is a response written by one of the gents:
"I see the  meaning in sonnet 130.  It shows honesty and unclouded sight.  However, I feel that my love is more extravagant like sonnet 18.  I would be completely drowned in foolish adoration which washes aside all flaws so that only the best can be seen.  The perfection depicted in the lines of sonnet 18 are what I would see in the woman I love.  Honestly, my lady in particular would probably be more accepting of 130, but I wouldn't give her anything but 18 because it is representative of how I feel, not necessarily how she really is."

How does one give this an "objective grade?"  It's a good answer.  It reveals an understanding of the poetry.  It reveals a connection to the poetry that goes beyond cursory reading.  It reveals a willingness to grapple with ideas.  It reveals honesty and self-knowledge.  Can any of those things be quantified?  Sure, I could grade him on things like the organization and development of the paragraph, or the number of specific references to the works; but who cares about those things if they were to come with no evidence of all the qualities previously mentioned?  And if I were to take this response as the "100%" against which other answers might be measured, how could I scale others against it?  What would constitute a response that was 85% as honest as this one, or only 70% as connected?  How do I measure, on a scale of 100, whatever that means, how well any student has understood these poems?  None of the things that matter can be graded, and most of the things we grade in school are the things the students forget quickest, truthfully because they are the least important to life.

I gave that response a 100.  Because I have to give it something.  I do not yet teach in a district that will let me get away with not giving grades, though the idea of not giving any grades is one for another time. However, we ought to realize that Oscar Wilde was right: "Education is an admirable thing.  But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."  Far less can it be graded.

J

Like a Boss

"A system based entirely on the division of labour is in one sense literally half-witted.  That is, each performer of half of an operation does really use only half of his wits." -G.K. Chesterton

As a rule I do not like reality TV.  However, I have found myself on many recent Sunday nights watching the show Undercover Boss.  The premise of the show is that a corporate boss or CEO will leave the corporate offices and, in disguise, will work in various franchises of his or her own company in order to discover more about the company's workings.  I have seen episodes featuring the CEO of a restaurant chain, a resort chain, a trucking company, the mayor of Cincinnati, and the chancellor of the University of California Riverside, to name a few.  The show does suffer from the obvious and annoying pitfalls of all reality TV: it is clearly selectively edited, it tugs strenuously at the heart strings, it digs a little too hard at times for drama, in short it's more TV than reality.

Yet I find myself drawn to the show.  I find myself surprised, when I know I shouldn't be, that the CEOs and big wigs seem to have very little idea about what goes on in the trenches of their businesses.  The bosses are consistently surprised that the employees they meet (clearly chosen ahead of time by producers because of their hard luck stories) are so dedicated to their jobs despite their financial struggles.  As a teacher I have never worked in the corporate world, but I can't imagine our superintendent walking into an elementary room and being surprised that the teacher had to deal with twenty-five third graders every day.  How can these people not know what is going on in their own company?  How can they not know that many employees struggle to make ends meet?  Do they not know what people are paid?  Again, I find it hard to believe.

Of course, at the end of the show the boss offers these chosen dedicated workers some sort of bonus, or a paid vacation, or training and promotion, or in one case a young worker was offered his own franchise and the franchise fee was waived.  "See!  The American Dream lives!" the producers are shouting at us.  I find myself wondering if the hundreds of other employees will reap the benefits of the boss's new perspective.  I can hope, but I have my doubts.

To bring in the quote I began with, it is always the boss who seems half-witted.  He or she is not able to hack the jobs performed by the employees.  That quote is from a book titled "The Outline of Sanity," (which I highly recommend) in which Chesterton lays down the principles of his economic philosophy, distributism.  One of his solutions is that the company ought to be run and owned by all of the people who work in it, not just a few at the top who give orders to the underpaid underlings.  It would be a company run on the principles of democracy, that system we supposedly believe in.  There would be no half-witted boss who sits in an office all day and has no idea how his company actually functions.  And maybe there would be no need to offer poorly paid and struggling employees what amounts to prizes for actually doing their jobs well.  It's a thought.

J