I keep saying I'll get to this topic, and it keeps getting more
complicated, and harder to find a way and a place to say the things
I might want to say -- but I _have_ to respond to Doug.
Evaluation _is_ the central problem. But it's not quite, I think,
the one we assume it is.
Why do we assume that evaluation has to be based on an evaluation of
a written text? Why do we assume that all texts, in order to serve
any function in a class (large or small) have to be (written in order
to be) evaluated? (I'm _not_, _not_, _not_ singling Doug out here:
this is about _all_ of us. Me, too. Except I'm starting to wonder
about it.)
Doug says,
> Last term I tried to mark 100 writing assignments myself (gone are
> the days when we could count on TAs for that even if we wanted to
> which I didn't.) I gave short assignments, too--1000 words--but
> it was still almost a month past the end of the course when I got
> the marks up.
If we know that 1000 words isn't enough (how much does the average
student write in a year, compared to how much _we_ write?), and we
know we can't read & respond to them all (much less mark them) is the
only alternative to give up, or to shorten the assignments to an
even more risible length? Where do readers come from?
Where did it come from, this idea that the only reader (the only
reader who counts) of the written text produced in the class is and
must be the teacher as examiner? Aren't there imaginable
alternatives?
And here's a hard one: why do we have this fixed, unalterable belief
that evaluating the piece of text a student produced (under whatever
appalling rhetorical and material circumstances she produced it) is a
reliable way of assessing that student's knowledge, skill, abilities,
merit?
(I don't mean, here, to question the reliability of our evaluation
of that piece of text -- though God knows there's reason enough to
question it. I mean to ask this: if our judgment of that text were
that of the Lord God of Hosts, why would we think it translated into
an evaluation of what that student knows about text, can do with
text, or knows about or can do with some other subject matter?)
OK, shut up, Hunt, you sound like a parody of yourself. Back to
Doug, who says, reasonably:
> The ungraded assignments seem to go much faster because I can just
> respond to them without having to justify a mark.
Yes. Think how much faster they'd go if you didn't even have to
_think_ about a mark, or try to compensate for the fact that the
students _expect_ you to be marking them, and justifying the marks.
Suppose you were just a reader, reading in order to learn, be
persuaded, be amused or engaged. In order, as Bakhtin says, to
prepare a response. Why do we think there's no way someone could
learn from that sort of transaction?
> I think there are better ways but I haven't found one that is
> completely satisfactory. The main thing is to find ways to
> compromise what we'd really like to do (clone ourselves and mark
> an assignment every week) without throwing away thinking/writing
> entirely.
I'm still trying to think this through. But I think there's an
opposition assumed here that's open to question. One the one hand
there's eight of me (at eight full professors's salaries) marking 100
student essays; on the other there's throwing away thinking and
writing. I don't think those are exclusive alternatives: I think
there are places in between. I think we need to start seeing our
role as that of creating rhetorical situations people can learn from,
instead of accepting the one the students bring with them from high
school or from other university classes (and are trapped in like a
hamster in a wheel), and trying to fiddle it into something they can
learn from. You can only learn one thing from spinning a hamster
wheel.
-- Russ
__|~_
Russell A. Hunt __|~_)_ __)_|~_ Aquinas Chair
St. Thomas University )_ __)_|_)__ __) PHONE: (506) 452-0424
Fredericton, New Brunswick | )____) | FAX: (506) 450-9615
E3B 5G3 CANADA ___|____|____|____/ [log in to unmask]
\ /
~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.StThomasU.ca/hunt/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~
