Writer’s Block Demolition Site

On Friday October 5, 2007 the Michigan Council of Teachers of English met in Lansing to give and hear lectures on and discuss different strategies, successes, and failures in English classrooms across the state and nation. Kathleen Blake Yancey kicked off the somewhat early morning with a slideshow keynote address on literacy in the 21st century. After the keynote, participants split into various breakout sessions.

I attended two sessions apart from the keynote: “Hanging on by your Fingernails until you gain a Toehold: Advice for Future Teachers from New Teachers” by Jill VanAntwerp was my first. She spoke primarily to future English teachers on the positives and negatives of beginning the teaching career. The second session I attended was “Why Rubrics Don’t Work for Me: Reclaiming Subjectivity in writing Assessment” by Maja Wilson.

Maja Wilson’s presentation left the strongest impression on me (<–this may or may not be because I was more awake for it). She talked about how rubric help neither student nor teacher when it comes to assessment. Her presentation included examples from actual assignments, all of which supported her belief that the most you can do when assessing a paper is to tell how the paper affects you as you read it–Novel idea! Honestly, though, her views were very new to me, and I won’t lie: I’m still a bit skeptical. But that’s okay. While I probably won’t go as far as she does and do away with grading papers altogether (that’s right…she doesn’t give letter “grades;” she assesses), she did make me excited to try some of her practices out and maybe marry the idea of grading with her idea of subjective assessment.

At the end of Maja Wilson’s presentation, she opened the floor up for questions (all in all, she seems pretty revolutionary, but, yes, she still ended the session just like everybody else). One question that struck me pertained to fields that required more objective assessment. The man mentioned airplane pilots and doctors: people who needed to be measured against a more rigid ruler. To be honest, I forget exactly where the question turned, but it got me thinking. I’m studying to become a high school English and Math teacher. I wondered whether some of Ms. Wilson’s methods could apply to my Math classroom? Math lends itself to rubrics and right vs. wrong answers, but her concept of reading students’ work–not so much for what’s on the paper but for the process that formed what’s on the paper–could easily be applied almost anywhere. As a Math teacher, what’s more important: getting the right answer or knowing how to manipulate numbers effectively to reach a helpful function/number? Math students need to understand how the numbers and variables come to act in certain ways, and if I can see how they get their answers, I can see where their thought process is. Aha! That’s why my teachers always added that awful caveat: SHOW ALL WORK! I guess they had a point.