9/4

Off the bat, I’m going to focus on assessment, as it is the first big subject we are tackling with Smagorinsky, and because it has been one of the most challenging and perplexing aspects of my education to become an educator. Assessment, even “authentic assessment,” has been a difficult concept and task to wrap my head around.

In the story Smagorinsky shares, he talks about how, to his fellow educators, it did not seem that the classroom and student experiences with Death of a Salesman had any connection to the hand-me-down test. And this is the point of authentic assessment, isn’t it? What kind of final product can our students produce that achieves the ideal of
a) students continuing to learn through it (the product),
b) honing in on their experience with the text or content,
c) being able to stamp a grade on the final product

To me, making sure I include all of these elements (and more) seems like an impossible task. I’m always questioning myself, especially on the last bit, saying, “How can I grade this?” It’s so easy to administer multiple choice, true/false/short answer tests because students are usually much less invested than if they were, perhaps, rewriting a scene in Death of a Salesman from a minute character’s perspective. When I say invested I mean, that while all students want a good grade, there is no real value in taking a test other than that final grade… The time spent a burden at best. “Gosh dang that multiple choice section really sealed the deal on Hamlet,” said no one ever. So, we know testing is the devil. The alternative is stress-inducing, and might make little sense to an administration or department that genuinely believes that the best, most honest way of assessing students (even teachers!) is by the exact kind of testing we are trying so hard to avoid.

I work as a receptionist, and while I was at work over the weekend, I met a client, a second-year, 1^st grade teacher at Columbus Elementary school in Ukrainian Village. She recalled her first year teaching with some contempt for their kindergarten teacher (apparently a real stickler), who had trained them to sit down, be quiet, and listen. She pent up a years worth of kindergarten energy and this young, first-year, down to earth teacher had a “reality check” when she realized, that at least at first, she couldn’t be the teacher she had always envisioned herself to be.

The thought of conditioning students to see testing as the big, pinnacle assessment is parallel to the teacher at Columbus. If I enter a school where testing is the norm (restrictive, boring), and I try to open my students up to alternative ways of assessment (open-ended, multiple steps and processes), what’s stopping them from saying, “I can do this work in my passing period”? The authentic assessment we talk about is polarly (speaking of words that should be included in the dictionary) opposite to the kind and type that students may be used to. I can see these methods turn around and bite us back because students don’t quite grasp these new, foreign expectations.

My question is: how do we ask our students to put 100% of themselves into the work they are producing when they have spent years taking tests and writing essays (like the kind that vehemently restrict the use of “I”)? Also, how do we eventually put a grade on what could be a semester’s worth of work and just put it to rest like that?