To Grade or Not to Grade
That should NOT be the question!
Marie Milner
A teacher dropped a bomb in my collaboration group today. She has decided to seek a teaching assignment elsewhere. Sandy, a passionate high school teacher in a local private school is someone who values the writing workshop philosophy and applies it in her classroom. And why is she leaving her position after several years at the school? Is her workload too cumbersome? Are the students too disrespectful? Is she being offered a huge salary to teach in a public school instead? No. None of these possibilities are true in her case.
Instead, Sandy’s contract for next year will state that she must assign less writing, with fewer writing workshop “steps” along the way, so that she can return the work in a more timely fashion. Parents evidently have been surfing student grade postings on the school’s web site and have complained to administrators that the writing Sandy is evaluating is not being returned quickly enough to warrant a sufficient number of posted grades on the site.
With almost one hundred students on her roll, how can Sandy satisfy parental demands for teacher accountability and still stay true to what she recognizes as sound pedagogy in the teaching of writing? And for that matter, who knew teacher “accountability” was about posting grades? I would have thought it had more to do with assuring that students learn what in an English classroom would be effective writing skills. I’ll bet Sandy assumes that at least an important part of her responsibility in the classroom is helping inspire confidence and creativity in those students as well.
By definition, the writing workshop model implies that student writing will go through a number of steps including pre-writing, rough drafts, revision, editing, etc. Sandy comments extensively on all of her students’ drafts in order to validate their work, offer them suggestions, and keep them actively engaged in the writing process. This is time consuming work.
When the general public sees a film such as the recent Freedom Writers, they are given the impression that a high school teacher only teaches one class a day of perhaps 15 students. The film’s story implies that all that is required to empower those students for life is a dedicated and passionate teacher with enough time to devote personal attention to each of those supposed 15.
Rather, those of us who teach middle and high school English classes understand the reality of the situation. We average 120 to 160 students a year. Who wouldn’t want to give each of them hours of personal attention, especially where their writing is concerned? Who wouldn’t want to be able to evaluate and return work overnight? But what fool thinks this is possible? Or what naïve parent expects a teacher to forfeit any semblance of a personal life to grade 24 hours a day? Which members of the non-teaching public would prefer a teacher who superficially scans a piece of student writing in the interest of turn-around, rather than investing the time it takes to offer concrete and useful criticism?
Yes, students and parents have a right to expect a reasonable turn-around time on assignments. No assignment collected in October should be languishing in a stack somewhere come January. But when a dedicated teacher chooses to assign more writing for the purpose of strengthening student writing; when she takes her students through a writing workshop program in order to better develop their talents; when she writes thorough and constructive criticism in order to support her students’ efforts; and when she believes herself to be fulfilling her philosophy of honoring each and everyone of her student’s voices; how can she can find herself in the position of saying, “I’m looking for a teaching job elsewhere. I’m not valued at my school.” Equally important, how can we find a way to empower both school administrators and student parents with the understanding of the writing process and an appreciation of those teachers who value their children enough to explore its infinite possibilities with them?
Perhaps there is an important role for Writing Projects to play in educating not only classroom teachers, students, and administrators, but parents as well. Parents are our students first and most influential teachers, so why not bring them into the writing workshop model fold? I think they would appreciate learning ways in which to become teacher partners in the quest to educate their children and make lifelong learners and writers of them.