This Way to the Egress!

My all-time favorite bumper sticker apropos of teaching is, of course, the classic "Oh, no, not another learning experience!"  But it is indeed the experience which is supposed to make me (and you, and all of us) better teachers and, perhaps make the students better, well, whatever it is they are aiming for.  I never know where "better" begins and where foolish co-optation by a doomed system ends, but I seem to have concluded a difficult and, god help me, instructive quarter having learned a few more lessons.  And, as per the mission of this blog, I have accumulated, like cat fur on my favorite sweater, more irony.  It keeps me warm. Meow.

The theme of my most recent ten-week fall research writing course was "Education Politics," based on the class's reading of Diane Ravitch's terrific, urgent, if kind of overwhelming (for students, for everybody) indictment of No Child Left Behind and its mutant offspring: The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  Ravitch, by the way, is obsessed.  Perhaps she feels she's got a lot to make up for, having once played a role in the development of the evil testing-based experiment picked up from the Texans, who like to test children a whole lot when they are not executing more prisoners than any other state in the union. I know, too easy, but there it is.  I subscribed to DR's email notifications, and consistently get a half-dozen a day, and some in the middle of the night.  But I digress. She, it seems, does not!

The especially ironic, perhaps even cruelly ironic part is that because there is just no way, despite my efforts, that at least a quarter (or even half) of my students can actually write a genuinely "passing"  final essay, I myself adopted a test-based pedagogical tool toward helping things along.  An exit exam, albeit the world's easiest.  I mean, it's open book, and includes references to lecture notes, readings, like that.  There's a short proofreading and editing section.  Did I mention that it's easy?  No, I don't feel good about this.  I feel just great about it!  It answers, with GPS-precise pedagogical ambition, laser-guided optimism and sharp political analysis, that question above about where to begin, where to end, and how to make sure that, indeed, process is understood as much as product.

Granted, I have struggled to talk myself - slowly, reluctantly - into this pedagogical feint, but persuading the instructor (me) is, after all, a skill I aim to teach my students so it strikes me as yet another perfectly perfect (and ironic) measure of just how nifty and malleable is the whole premise and practice of teaching.

My students want to "succeed."  They can, if they show me that they know what, at least, I tried to teach them.  And I can integrate this variety of, yes, self-critique (not a nasty ole test) into their final essay grade. Indeed, the World's Easiest Exit Exam provides me the assurance I need that the students, if they were given a real chance to do well in this demanding class (adequate preparation, civic literacy, reading and comprehension skills, more time) they would.  Make that, they will.  Because, when they get to the required upper-division writing class, they will at least remember the answers to my dumb quiz.  So, yes, this is a developmental, cumulative, building blocks approach.  Which makes me perhaps a blockhead.

Finally, the best part of the exit exam is that it assures students that they have indeed learned something about writing, not to mention civic literacy and being a student.  At least, they have a document which says so.  And in teaching a required composition class which nobody really wants to take, it seems to me that you should get something - and give something - that you can take with you, documenting your learning (and teaching) experience.  I'd prefer to pretend that my largely remedial work would produce A papers and politically acculturated students. I'd prefer that No Child wasn't law.  I'd prefer that we fully funded education. I'd prefer not to give grades at all.  Yikes, I'm starting to sound like Bartleby the Teacher.  Except that I am mostly saying yes, not no.