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In my morning surfing I happened upon a couple of passages that I find quite resonant.
Asking more of oneself as a teacher or of one’s students as learners can make you feel like you are fighting an uphill battle. The reasons for that is because, in fact, you are, according to this pithy encapsulation:
The mutual non-aggression pact between an instructor who doesn’t ask very much and students who’d rather not be bothered…fits short-term institutional needs disturbingly well.
Sounds right. Not only must you battle the inherent human tendency towards sloth (in yourself and others), but the incentives at most institutions are not set up to reward disturbing the universe. Students would rather work less so they can concentrate on other matters—sports, their social lives, working, whatever. Administrators do not want to be bothered by complaining students (or their parents). Faculty are usually rewarded more for publishing than they are for moving the needle in terms of teaching quality, plus they are probably better liked by deans when they cause fewer problems, including producing grumpy students. So why bother? Because you feel a sense of obligation to your students’ long-term interests, because you love your material and passionately want to convey it and enliven others’ lives with it, because not pushing yourself and your students makes you feel terribly bored, because you are a damn fool? Sometimes I don’t push my students or myself hard enough, but I am often told, initially to my surprise, that I have a reputation for “academic rigor.” I think the reason for that must be that at both institutions where I have taught the incentives for being inspirational and demanding in the classroom are at best tepid, with predictable overall results.
I have long had this inchoate sense that using rubrics to grade papers is, though useful in some ways, too mechanistic. Yes, it is, say some folks who’ve thought much more about the matter than I have:
[R]ubrics with point values are determinist in the ways of a mathematical model, working on the assumption that the factors of an essay work together in always predictable ways. She argues that rubrics would work for something like billiards, for “If I hit a billiard ball with a specific amount of force in a certain direction, it will move in a predictable way.” Writing, however, “may not be a simple system like billiards, subject to the laws of determinism. Writing may more closely resemble complex, chaotic systems like global weather, economic systems, or political unrest” (32).”
From What Now, commenting on Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment.
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