![]() If you give yourself a hard time because you find yourself so conflicted when grading, read Tobin’s “Thirteen things that I think about when I give grades that teachers are not supposed to think about when we give grades” (65-66). If you want to dig deeply into that complexity, try Tobin’s chapter “What We Really Think About When We Think About Grades” (57-74). “You can tell students anything you want about ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘thinking for yourself,’” Jerry Farber says, but “the grading system you employ-a middle finger extended before them-is always more eloquent still” (274). We may want to eliminate grades from our courses, but we have to be realistic about how we compute them and how they affect our students. As Elbow says, “The more I try to soft-pedal assessment, the more mysterious it will seem to students and the more likely they will be preoccupied and superstitious about it” (“Embracing” 153). It helps no one to be dishonest with ourselves or our students about the place of grades in our classes. In our syllabi and elsewhere, we need to be proactive and open about our grading and other policies, rather than downplay our role and pretend we’re not the gate-keepers, the grade-givers. Constructed with care and a certain degree of paranoia, syllabi help us through difficult times. While that may be a depressing task, it helps us not to worry about the worst for the rest of the semester. So in grading and other crucial issues, we need to prepare for the worst. We have to establish rules and policies not for the one hundred students each year who act like reasonable, civil human beings but for the one per year (or decade) who acts like a bad lawyer on steroids, tries to get away with dereliction in your class, and then searches your syllabus with a magnifier to find the loophole that permits loutish behavior. ![]() Teaching in the age of litigation sometimes becomes a defensive game. GRADING, ATTENDANCE, AND OTHER PAINS-IN-THE-BUTT ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |