subtext

I was given the morning off to grade the short answer portion of the CBA (curriculum Based Assessment) my students took a few weeks ago. We had to do the grading on campus, I guess because the administration doesn’t trust us to do our jobs. It took about an hour to read through the four or so sentences each one wrote comparing two articles which where on the test. The students for most part succed in providing the kind of prose required for the test. They did not have to think all that much, the two articles followed a familiar narrative of hard work and determination in sports. Most of the students’ answers were fairly stock responses to the articles with the addition of quotes from the articles to ‘prove’ the students assertions. But since the articles were cliches of sports narratives, the students simply had to scan briefly to find appropriate cliches in the articles to back up the cliched assertions. The best part of the process was that it did not take all that long for me to read them so I had a couple of hours to get some other work done that I could not do if I were in the room with the students. I used to wonder why they rarely let us work on planning and grading, or thinking about what we do as teachers. The administrators always seem to want to control what we do with our non-classroom time, as if we were not to be trusted to be interested professionals. Of course I know that many teachers are not interested professionals, and would not use the time in any kind of productive manner related to teaching. Yet, I think that if you treat people as if they are untrustworthy then they will become that way. At least that is how I operate with my students: I trust them to be intelligent curious young men and women and they usually show that they are that way. I have been asked how do I get my students to read the two books I require them to read each six weeks: my real answer is that I expect them to read two books each six weeks. I don’t tell them it is hard, I don’t make a big deal about it; it is simply what they are supposed to do, and most of them do it, mainly because I give them time in class to do it. Reading is after all a leisure activity, which we rarely give them time to do. Every year my students tell me they have never read so many books in their entire lives. This both thrills me and saddens me. Thrills me because many of them discover that there is something worthwhile in books, and saddens me that it has taken until their last year in high school to discover that reading can be important to them personally.