Avoid the “Correct-Answer Compromise”

Think back to the last time someone tested your performance, whether it be in a classroom, on the job, or at home. What exactly were they testing? Was the goal to determine whether you’d memorized facts correctly, whether you could perform a certain task as expected, or did the test, in whatever form in was administered, measure your deep understanding of a skill, process, problem, or discipline?  

My students assess my performance all the time in their heads, I’m sure, and at least once a year they get to do it on paper. Occasionally (not enough, in my opinion) someone in the English department will come and observe my teaching and then chat with me about it later.

When I was in graduate school, I was mainly assessed through writing because I studied poetry and, before that, English education. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember taking a traditional test or quiz in years besides the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), on which, I don’t mind revealing, I did relatively poorly. Supposedly the GRE was meant to assess my ability to proceed successfully to graduate school. I took it toward the end of my first of two quite successfully earned graduate degrees, making the test, in my mind, superfluous, and my scores reflect that attitude, and the fact that I’m just plain not good at those kinds of tests. (This is a disclaimer in a sense because I may be more inclined to defend such testing if I were better at it, but given what I understand about assessment, that’s doubtful.)

The GRE is a genre of testing called formal summative assessment that students undertake in every state in the union, the kind that continues to be controversial. You’re probably more familiar with the term standardized testing, and you’ve likely taken more than one version of it if you went through public schooling in America. There’s the SAT and ACT for college admissions, and each state has its own test for students in grades K-12. In the state where I received most of my schooling, Louisiana, it was called the LEAP test. It sounds so energizing and forward thinking, doesn’t it?

Summative assessment is just what it sounds like; it sums up what a student has learned after a period of time. Generally, its purpose is accountability. School systems need to prove that students have learned certain skills or universities want to ensure that incoming Freshmen have what’s needed to be successful at their institutions, so they administer summative assessments to collect data. Of course, the validity and relevancy of that data is questionable.   

But I don’t mean to get bogged down in the politics and minutia of standardized testing in this blog post. There are plenty of great venues designed just for that, like this Facebook group called “OPT OUT of State Tests: Parent/Student Support Against Standardized Testing” and this persuasive article published in Minnesota English Journal called “The Case Against Standardized Testing.” I highly recommend looking into both.

Writing for Social Change

NOTE: I originally wrote this post for a blog called Bark: A Blog of Literature, Culture, and Art. If you'd like to read it on that site, click here. Bark is the official blog of the MFA program in creative writing at Eastern Washington University, where I earned my MFA in poetry, and for which I've written blogs for the past two years.

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I'm just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I've been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, "Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You've seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don't know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I'm not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don't think most other people do either." Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don't use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database.... But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I'm charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I'm sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper's website, Beyond the Bracelet.