There are days when the brain waves don’t come together to form a single coherent line of thinking. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot going on. It’s just pizza by the slice, rather than the whole pie. Sometimes, as I write, one slice emerges larger than the rest. Let’s see what happens.
First, there’s one of my favorite subjects, relationships. We’ve all been reading about the isolating effects of social media, particularly for young people, which has driven up the rate of depression in that age group. All that is indisputable, but this week I’ve been struck by how it’s produced the opposite result for me. Having access to email and Facebook – I don’t use X or Instagram, just the platform that geezers most rely on – has sustained and nourished relationships that would otherwise have withered.
Because I’m connected in this way, I’ve lately traveled to, among other places, small town New Hampshire, rural Illinois and Jerusalem. A text from NH brought the news that yet another friend had died, the second this month. Both were long-time residents of a retirement community which kept them safe in their last years. We would have learned of these deaths eventually, but the immediacy of the reports foregrounds them in a special way.
From small town Illinois comes the news from a former student who left city life in Chicago for a quieter, more affordable existence only to find herself in the path of a tornado and a record-breaking hailstorm, right out of the Ten Plagues we’ll be enumerating at our seder ten days from now. Four neighboring houses were demolished, leaving A’s house relatively unscathed and a sizeable burden of survivor’s guilt to deal with. The series of exchanges with A also brought me back to our own experiences relocating from the big city to the country – how lonely it was originally, how long it took to be surrounded by a network of friends dense enough to feel like a community. I hope sharing my experience with A helped her see a brighter future ahead to reward her courageous decision to change her life.
And on to Jerusalem for the news of another death, this one three weeks in the past. J. was the wife of a friend for 65 years, my graduate school roommate who left for Israel soon after his studies were complete. Even though we haven’t been in regular touch, his visits to the US kept the flame alive. Amazingly, we have remained politically in sync, particularly about the dark path Israel has been led down hand in hand with Donald Trump. Oh, there’s so much more, reassuring words and images from the wide world that remind us that we are not alone.
I’m in the middle of reading an article in the most recent Harvard alumni magazine about the scourge of so-called grade inflation at the college. My first reaction was, “If they’re enrolling the best and the brightest, why shouldn’t a disproportionate number of them earn A’s?” It turns out to be more complicated. The problems are extensions of dilemmas that have always been embedded in the very process of grading. Students choosing courses that we used to call “guts” where an elevated grade was expected with a minimum investment of effort. Most disturbing is the damaging impact of the expectation of A’s on the student/teacher relationship where conferences once contained the possibility of building personal connections but instead have become transactional.
I have no grand solution to this problem, but it made me grateful that during my teaching career I have participated in processes that managed to avert the horrors of grading and replaced them with more meaningful and instructive forms of assessment. But because they are labor intensive, they fall on the shoulders of already overburdened teachers and are impractical in the face of large classrooms.
At Antioch New England, where I headed the teacher education program for three years, we produced a narrative report on each student’s efforts in each course. Years later I learned about the work of The Prospect School in Bennington, Vermont whose archives reside at the University of Vermont. They did Antioch one better by producing expansive and comprehensive assessments of each child’s emotional, social and academic development several times a year which included samples of their work – writing, art – as evidence in support of the narrative. Decades later teachers visit these archives in search of models for their own assessment work.
In the case of Prospect, this process was built into the system from the outset in kindergarten. It’s much harder when students have experienced traditional grading to wean them away from it. When I was teaching creative writing in middle school and high school, I refused to grade the students’ productions. Instead, I offered extensive written comments, intended to reinforce their strengths and provide some recommendations for how to improve their future writing. It was a constant effort to ward off the predictable student query, “But what’s my grade?” Those queries diminished over time when it was clear that no response was forthcoming. When Rosellen taught at the School of the Art Institute, creative work was never graded or who would ever have done anything chancy, how would anyone have dared to “fail”?
I’m afraid my war on grades is a losing battle because of the armies of parents who want to know how their kid is doing in comparison to everyone else’s kids. However, a determined teacher can work to focus student attention on more meaningful ways of providing feedback.
I was planning to introduce a third slice of the pie – my anxiety about decluttering before it’s too late, but that will be for another day. The first two slices will have to suffice to satisfy your hunger for now on this beautiful first day of spring.
