Hopefully the blog will accept me this time. I've been trying to post for a week.
Every careful homeschool mother has a copy of Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers on her bookshelf. In this book, Elbow argues that we don't need teachers so long as we have a trusted group of collaborators who will listen to our ideas with open minds and without judgement. Inoue seems to have driven this wagon on a cliff when he suggests first teaching students how to evaluate each other and then having them teach themselves to write. Every homschooler would agree that grading is bad. We don't want to grade our students because they are out beloved children, and slapping an institutionalized mark of value upon them does nothing but destroy their self esteem, and sort them.
In public education, children are sorted (by grades) and then educators respond to them in accordance with the group to which they've been assigned. In homeschool, educators simply continue to present information in as many ways as necessary until the student has mastered the material. They avoid grading; it's the equivalent of stepping in dog doo. But, unlike Inoue, homeschoolers avoid grading for the sake of the student. Inoue's resistance to grading seems to spring from a place of self-loathing or at least self-doubt. He begins his essay relating a time when he did not see himself as competent to grade student writing. In our early teaching experiences, each of us must overcome those initial feelings. In the first days of our Masters degree teaching, we wondered if we were grading properly, fairly, competently. But, we did overcome those doubts-- with the help of our professors and our peers-- and we learned that grading (as sucky as it is) is vital to the institution of learning. Just fail to enter your students' grades into the university's system on time, and see how important they are.
Shelly's approach echoes homeschool philosophy so closely, I had to smile as I enjoyed her presentation. She presents her material to her stunts in as palatable a manner as possible: textbook free. And she values students' process far above the final product in her grading. I do too. Even when I first began teaching college writing during my Masters degree work, I knew that my university's philosophy of achieving a strict overall GPA and putting students into grade slots (2 or 3 As, 2 or 3 Bs, Mostly Cs, etc.) was wrong and unfair. I couldn't rationalize in my own mind the idea of a subjectively graded portfolio taken up on the last day of class being worth 50% of my students' grades. By this formula, I was expected to sort my students into the provided slots. Well, I never did it that way. Instead, I valued participation, revision, and process over the product contained in that weighty portfolio.
Fortunately for us, in this university setting, we enjoy the nonjudgemental group of collaborators Elbow emphasizes in his book. We can bounce our ideas off one another, soak up new ideas, and and pilfer great ideas outright. Here, we are allowed the freedom to develop our own best philosophies of teaching and grading writing. How cool is that.
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