Diving into the Nothing

It is easy, and refreshing, and kind of liberating, to say "I will not be assigning grades for individual work this semester."

Turns out, though, that it is kind of a little bit terrifying to actually do it.

But like I always say, if you're not a little bit scared of your new project, it's not worth doing. So forward we go, knees shaking but still walking.

The students seem on board. We read Alfie Kohn today and discussed his ideas. They mostly echoed his sentiments, and mostly expressed enthusiasm about the idea of going gradeless. They had hard questions about how this was going to work, questions that I was not entirely prepared to answer. Humility is a gift here: I think a lot of teachers are not programmed to say "I don't know, lets work together and figure this out" when students ask very basic questions about one's practice. And yet I said it today, over and over again. It got to the point where we all started believing I meant it.

The big problem, we all agreed, was motivation. School has traditionally been predicated on an exchange system--you do a think (often an onerous or useless thing) for me, I will trade you for some marks that you can then use to purchase admission to the post-secondary program of your choice. Traditional marking strategies essentially buy work from students--and the better the work, the more I am willing to pay. But we only buy the product. We can nickle and dime and try to buy some process, too--show me a rough draft; no reading notes = no essay--but a lot of that can be faked.

Once the marks are gone, the exchange system breaks down. What is left to get students to WANT to do English class things?

Well, there's still an exchange--it only happens at mid-term and at term's end. So there's that: instead of buying an essay or a poster-board, I'm buying a semester of reading, writing, reporting. But we're trying to decentralize that. Putting all the eggs in one nebulous and arguable basket doesn't make the eggs taste any different.

We need intrinsic motivators. We need students to care about the subject, about the topic, about the products that they are supposedly engaged in making. Which means we need to decentralize the classroom as much as possible: let students choose texts; let them choose topics; let them choose forms of presentation. There are still limits, of course--they have to choose challenging texts; they have to choose relevant topics; they have to present their work in a way that showcases their English skills according to the strands outlined in the curriculum that I am still obliged to follow--but within those broad guidelines, I need to get myself as much out of the way as possible and enable students to bring their passions to the room and to the tasks.

It is hard to disappear. It's hard to get out of the way in my own classroom.

But it's easier for students to see through a window than through a wall.

Student quote of the day:

" I remember learning about something in class and being interested by it and wanting to learn more, but not being able to because it wasn't part of the format/curriculum or not having time to do so because we had already finished the project from that part of the curriculum. I think grades, and just learning things for the grade, oppress students interests and diminish their motivation, much like Kohn thought. ...students should want to learn things in class for the sake of knowing something or being interested in it, not just learning something for the sake of passing a class."