Welcome to Teacher's Lounge.
I had planned on composing something about teaching critical reading as a necessary step in teaching critical thinking, full of links to useful and authoritative sources, interwoven with tales from this semester's experiment in reducing textbook costs. Instead of researching that, though, I've mostly been dealing with my sick kid. I was sure it was a mild case of H1N1 triggering his breathing problems, in spite of having had the whole family immunized; the nice people at the emergency room, though, said he tested negative for influenza.
Faculty here were advised in August to be accommodating of student absences this semester, which has probably helped keep more people in our community healthy. I've offered students a more liberal absence policy and opportunities to make up work when they've been out sick. You're adults, I tell them. I trust you to make decisions that reflect your priorities, and being able to breathe is a really high priority in my book.
Follow me over the fold for some navel-gazing misgivings about trusting students, educators as authority figures, and the need for evaluation of learning.
If I were the queen of the universe, higher education would look a lot different from the system currently in place in the United States. Nobody would ever need to grade anything. Students would come away from their educational experience with portfolios demonstrating what they'd learned rather than transcripts demonstrating what courses they'd completed. Classes would be open-ended, with no set start or end date; students would work with faculty and other students until projects were completed or skills mastered rather than until fifteen weeks had passed.
Unfortunately, my application for queen of the universe has apparently gotten lost in the mail. My students and I must work within an educational system that reinforces memorization, time management, and the accumulation of points. We may say we value authentic learning, but we still award scholarships and admissions to graduate programs based on GPA.
You can't really teach students critical thinking while simultaneously bullshitting them about what grades mean. Even a lab rat could figure out the stimulus-response relationship between the rewards attached to grades and students' inclination to focus on where their points are coming from. My students are busy with other classes and life outside of school. If there are no points attached to some piece of a course-- an assigned reading or demonstration of an essential skill-- that piece of the course will not get much of their attention.
I assume all of us educators who have to assign grades put a lot of thought into the carrots-and-sticks element of evaluating student learning. There's an art to matching your local institutional culture, your current students' generational characteristics, and the underlying educational philosophy of the course you're teaching with a series of scored learning activities sequenced over time to result in a planned learning outcome.
I like having a carefully designed syllabus with clearly stated course policies and grading criteria, because it lets me de-emphasize the role of educator as authoritarian once I'm actually in the classroom with the students. When a student's performance isn't meeting expectations, I can point to the course policies and say, "These are the rules; I must be fair and consistent in applying them."
Students who struggle in my courses may still find me to be a big meanie-head, what with my failing to bend course policies to meet their crisis of the moment. Putting all the authoritarian arbitrariness about grades into the syllabus and bringing as little of it into the classroom as possible works well for me most of the time, though. Learning has very little to do with points. I want my face-to-face time with my students to be primarily about whatever that day's material is about, whether that's the clinical implications of administering repeat doses of narcotic agonist-antagonists or the primacy of gaze in making technocratic knowledge claims about the body.
So what's your preferred balance? We have to assign grades at the end of our designated block of time with our students, which leaves us with a substantial degree of power over our students. What do you do with your power? How do you manage the role of authoritarian within the role of educator?