Friday, October 20, 2017

How would you grade a great weekend?

"Have a great weekend," I told my students, "And that's an order. I'll be grading your weekend on Monday."

But how would I do that? Compose a rubric measuring how many hours students spent studying, drafting, learning their lessons? Frankly, some of my students really need to walk away from the books and go outside for while.

They could wear little digital video cameras all weekend to record their activities and then do a presentation in class on Monday--"My Weekend and Welcome to It"--but that's a Panopticon I'd prefer not to enter. 

Or I could ask them to write an essay reflecting on what makes a weekend great and how their  weekends measured up to their own standards of greatness, but that sounds like a excellent way to wreck a student's weekend. I know that all the cool profs are requiring students to write metacognitive reflection essays about, essentially, everything, but at some point they'll have nothing to reflect on but the writing of reflection essays, which is way too meta for me.

I want my students to keep learning outside the classroom but I also want them to rest and recreate and renew themselves so they can learn more in the classroom. If I really had to grade my students' weekends, I'd have to base the grades on how prepared they are to tackle new challenges on Monday morning. Wide awake and ready to discuss the reading? A+. Dozing at the desk and unable to  respond to the simplest questions? D-. How they achieved those conditions is really not my concern.

(One day I'll write an essay reflecting on why I resist asking students to reflect on the writing of reflection essays, but right now I'm all out of meta.)

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