Academic History Essay, Part Two

This past week, I had group conferences about students’ plans for their academic history drafts. The responses ran the gamut—from the student who knew exactly what he wanted to say, and was excited about playing around with how best to say it, to the student who had no idea, really, where she wanted to “go” in her essay.

I was again reminded what a challenging assignment this is. We are each influenced by so many experiences—not to mention other factors, like genetics and environment—that to boil ourselves down, even within the category of “who I am as a student,” to four or five double-spaced pages is, on some levels, simply absurd. We could each write a book and still have material to spare.

And so the giant disclaimer that must overarch our essays is this: our essays only describe PART of who we are, the part we have chosen to focus on. We are other things too. The assignment should then become manageable—but still tricky: we must be careful not to oversimplify, not to sell short either ourselves or our abilities to think critically about ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about my own essay, what I would write if I were to describe “who I was” as a student during that transition from high school into my freshman year of college. My main point, I think, would be this:

I am an (almost) straight-A slacker. I do just enough to get really good grades in part because I’m super-confident (people have been telling me my whole life how smart I am, and I don’t really HAVE to work hard to get high grades) and in part because I’m insecure (people always valuing you for how smart you are means you have to look smart or they might not value you anymore, and what if you try REALLY HARD at something and you turn out to be not that smart after all?).

In my essay, I think I would include the following events:

• My first day of class, in first grade, when I couldn’t find my name on my desk and was afraid the teacher would think I was NOT smart.
• That Lord of the Flies book report, where my teacher suggested I was VERY smart, and my mom suggested I was NOT so smart. (Or at least, that my report was not good enough.)
• How embarrassed I was when I missed my first spelling word—“children”—when I was in FOURTH grade. That’s a lot of school without missing a spelling word.
• How I hardly remember studying at all through junior high and high school—instead, I would stay up late at night reading trashy novels. Trashy as in Stephen King and the like. School was easy.
• But then there was Latin—which I just didn’t get, didn’t try to get, and I cheated.
• And I hid my “C” in physics, where I also didn’t “get” things and didn’t try very hard, from my parents—who by then were so convinced I was smart that they didn’t even ask for my report card.

But I’m wondering now whether my original assertion: that I didn’t work hard partly because I was insecure. . . . I wonder whether that’s right or not. Maybe I didn’t work hard just because I didn’t really have to—and because I could get away with things (like cheating) if I found myself in a bind.

Maybe the better question is why I worked hard enough to get almost straight A’s—surely I did have to work some; I remember doing tremendous prep for my ACT and SAT exams. So, maybe I’ve arrived at a new thesis: I was an (almost) straight-A slacker because I believed I was smart, and since school really was easy, I didn't have to try very hard. But I tried hard enough--or I hid my less-than-outstanding moments--because I knew people would be disappointed in me if I didn’t live up to their expectations.

How I turned into such a pleaser is another question—I hate to disappoint people still today.

I’ll have to keep thinking about that.

But I’m getting closer to an approach for my essay.

Academic History Essay

This week, we’ve been getting into our first “big” paper for the semester: the Academic History Essay. In some ways, the assignment is a huge experiment: it’s a combination of two kinds of essays (the remembered event and the profile) that have been standard assignments in freshman composition courses for decades now. The assignment basically asks the writer to think of school-related memories that stand out to her or him. Then the writer selects some of the most important memories to write about, and s/he describes them in a way that helps show who the writer is as a student—and what events were important in her/his becoming that person. To me, this is a much more sophisticated writing task than “just” creating a remembered event or a profile, and it seems like a much more significant exercise, as well: after all, students should come to know better “who they are” through completing the assignment.

To get things started, we’ve been working on timelines, where we plot key memories from our school experiences. I always like to “test out” my own assignments, at least drafting a paper myself so that I can have a better chance of seeing what’s difficult about an assignment and where my students might get tripped up. I plan to play around with my draft on my blog, so everyone can see. First, I'll give you some information about my own academic timeline, which I sketched out as a model in class. On it were events like these:

• not being able to find my desk on the first day of first grade (the teacher had put paper apples with each student’s name on his/her desk, and I couldn’t see mine anywhere: she had to show me, and I was so embarrassed, partly because I was afraid she’d think I couldn’t even read my name).
• being intimidated by reading the cursive on the board in the second-graders' classrooms when I was in first grade. It looked so scary.
  
• lying to my second grade teacher about having cheese on my sandwiches at lunch: if we had all four foodgroups, we got a sticker, and I often didn’t have a dairy group item—but I wanted the sticker.
• writing my fourth grade book report on Lord of the Flies: my teacher was WAY impressed, but my mother was not—she criticized the way I’d phrased things. To this day, I don’t show her my writing.
• cheating in some of my high school classes--and getting away with it. Nobody expects the "good girl" to misbehave.
  
• after being a straight-A student almost all the time, getting a C in physics in 12^th grade. I figured my parents would be mad and/or disappointed—and then I realized I didn’t even have to tell them. They just assumed I was making As and didn’t even ask for my report card.

There were lots more items on my timeline from class, but those are a few that stand out. I’m still trying to decide which ones will go in my own paper—and in particular, I’m trying to figure out what they all “add up to.” What do I want to convey as my dominant impression of myself as a student? I’m still trying to figure that out. Right now, I see that the moments that seem to illustrate me are easier to point to than the ones that I really think shaped me—but that Lord of the Flies book report experience was a pretty crucial moment, I think.

I seem to have been a student who wavered between confidence and insecurity, in terms of my academic self. I was a pleaser—but sometimes unethically so. I’m still trying to figure out how those are connected, and I’m realizing that I’ve asked my students to engage in a really challenging task.

I can’t wait to see what we all come up with!

Letters and Numbers and Grades, Oh My!

I so enjoy being able to work with a GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistant) in my composition courses. Our GTA program is set up so that experienced faculty work closely with individual GTAs (who will become composition instructors in later semesters); together, we engage in lots of discussion about the hows and whys of our work: how and why we design our courses, shape our assignments, run our classes, and respond to student writing as we do, for example. I love having an interested partner with whom to talk about all of those things. I might not have all the best teaching strategies figured out, but I want always to be able to explain my reasoning for why I do X or Y or Z, and I want always to treat my students ethically and with their best interests in mind.

I also appreciate having the GTA’s extra pair of eyes: she pays close attention to what’s happening in the classroom—especially to students’ reactions to various moments in class—and her observations are incredibly useful to me.

Case in point:

On Wednesday, a student asked why the grading scale for my course is a 8-point instead of a 10-point. An excellent question, really. Certainly a fair question. I wasn’t expecting it, though, and I’m afraid I spent way too much time on my answer (which, ironically, I’m spending even more time on here in my blog). Ms. Hornback, the GTA paired with that class, mentioned afterward that she thought even though I’d talked for a long time about the grading scale, the class still hadn’t “gotten” it.

I figure Ms. Hornback was right. It was an awfully circular discussion, trying to cover too much, too quickly, and going in too many different directions at once.

I could’ve answered the grading scale question a lot of different ways. I could simply have said, for instance, that I’m trying to raise the bar. Or that I’m just exercising my faculty right to set my grading policies—that I use an 8-point scale basically just because I can. Those would have been easy answers, and both are partly true. But neither gets at the heart of the reason.

I use the 8-point scale, as I tried to explain to the class, in part because I think it helps create the illusion of extra difficulty, conveys the idea that the course will be extra challenging. So, I use it to send a message. The word “illusion” in the last sentence is key, though: I also tried to explain that grading scales are incredibly arbitrary and that, in fact, I could use any typical grading scale in the course and my students would earn the same grades—a “B” in the 8-point scale would also be a “B” in the 10-point scale.

As I write that, I can see why my students might have been confused, even with an example sketched on the board. If an essay earns 82 points, and that’s a “B”-range grade with one scale and a “C”-range grade in another, how could I possibly be right in saying that a “B” in one is the same as a “B” in the other?

Here’s why: For writing courses, I don’t start with a number grade pulled out of the air (though I’m afraid that’s the sort of thing many students have received on lots of writing assignments, and it certainly helps explain their preferences for 10-point grading scales). Instead, I assign letter grades to formal assignments, and then I use a conversion scale so that my letter grades translate into number grades, which are then easy to average with consistency and fairness.

A little more explanation for how a “B” is a “B” is a “B”: If, in my grading scale, a “B” ranges from 85-92, I’ll let the number in the middle of those equal the solid “B.” So, a “B”=88.5. (“B+” and “B-” are numbers close to the ends of the span, and other letter grades follow that same pattern.) If I use the ten-point scale, however, the “B” range is 80-89. The number in the middle of those—the solid “B” grade, in my system—is 84.5.

So, in the 10-point system, the “B” translates into a lower number than in the 8-point system, which means that earning a “B” in either system is equally easy (or difficult).

If you’ve stuck with me this far, I’d love for you to comment as to whether you follow my explanation. I didn’t much intend to blog this week on grading scales, but there are a couple of points this all (sort of) leads to that I think are important to make. Here they are:

• Many students experience education as something that simply “happens to” them—with elements that may seem unclear or even unfair.
• For various reasons, many students would never question, for example, how a professor arrived at a particular grade.
• As students, you have a right to understand, and as faculty, we have an obligation to be able to articulate--and have good reasons for--why we do what we do.

Those are my “big picture” observations, things I’d like you to remember during your time at MC.

And now an observation about myself, as a teacher: I think sometimes I’m too honest and open. By telling you the 8-point scale gives the illusion of difficulty, I’ve negated the illusion. Being honest with you feels “right,” but I hope I haven’t made the course seem less challenging—it has to be challenging, after all, or you’re wasting your money and we’re all wasting our time.

Later in the semester we should return to questions of grading and education and of how much an “A” (or “B” or “C”) that was easy to earn is really even worth. . . .

A point of advice, as I close: some of the most challenging professors I ever studied under used a 10-point scale. Don't let a grading scale give you a false sense of security.