In which we see Ms. Bradstreet grade an exam (and herself)
The Maria Chronicles, #20
Denise: 77%
Olivia: 72%Mia: 81%Wilhelmina: 94%Derek: 64%
Vanessa: 80%
Ali: 69%
Shit, Maria thinks to herself as she flips through the set of just-graded exams. I've got a problem on my hands.
Or, more accurately, a set of problems. The first is that some of these kids are surprisingly mediocre at absorbing the factual material she'd like them to master. This is not exactly a news flash when it comes to someone like Derek. It's more unexpected in the case of Olivia. She's been a bit of a cipher in class, but has struck Maria as someone who's largely on the ball. That may not be the case after all.
Then there's someone like Vanessa, which points toward problem #2. Eighty percent is not a terrible score, but she knows Vanessa well enough to think that she'll be upset when she gets the exam back. "I am so ready for this test," she told Maria this morning as Maria gave her a copy of the exam. Apparently not, Vanessa. Presumably there are other Vanessas in the class as well. This is likely to lead to disputatious discussions as well as silent resentment. Keenly aware of her probationary status in the eyes of the student body as New Teacher, Maria would just as soon not antagonize multiple students at this point. Not that she should be letting that bother her.
Actually, Maria is not especially concerned about a set of scores that average in the mid-seventies (which, strictly speaking is where the average should be: 75% is a C). In any case, she'd rather be perceived as a hard-ass than a pushover, especially at this point. Grade inflation being what it is, she's almost required to cede ground over the course of the year, if for no other reason than to foster a sense of psychic confidence that at least some of these kids are actually going to need by way of creating self-fulfilling academic prophecies. Realistically speaking, there are two tiers of grades that can end up on a report card that don't result in unpleasant consequences for student and/or teacher (usually in the form of parental protest): some form of A and some form of B. Maria usually has to go lower on that in a few cases a semester, but avoids it when she can. On assessments like exams and essays, however, she's generally comfortable handing out Cs and Ds, especially in the case of papers that she allows students to re-write.
But then there's problem #3, her biggest source of discomfort. And that is a feeling that it's Maria who really performed poorly here. Question #19, for example, asks students about the antifederalists, and Maria now sees that there may have been some ambiguity about whether the term referred to people who opposed the Constitution in the 1780s, as opposed to those who opposed the Federalist party in the 1790s. Sixteen of her twenty students got that one wrong. Seventeen students didn't know the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which Maria is sure she mentioned in class. Maybe that was the problem: she mentioned it in class. Sure, it was in the textbook. But as far as these kids are concerned, if it wasn't discussed in class, it didn't happen, and Maria has given them little reason to think otherwise.
Maria decides to void those two questions, which means she'll give three points apiece to all those kids who got it wrong, and three points to any who got either or both right. This will bring the average score up to somewhere around 80%, -- a B- in Maria's book -- and drag Derek over the line from an F to a D. Vanessa won't be thrilled, but hopefully less querelous; Olivia will remain mired in mediocrity. Ditto for Ali. Maria will have to keep a closer eye on those two, part of which will involve watching to see how proactive they are in grappling with this outcome.
Maria begins entering the scores in her gradebook in pencil, knowing that errors and challenges will inevitably lead to adjustments. She thinks of an old saying to the effect that it's best not to look too closely into the making of sausages and wars. Grading, she muses grimly, should be added to that list.
In which we see Ms. Bradstreet parry a grade-grubbing parent
The Maria Chronicles, # 18
Maria is startled when the phone at her desk rings at 11:17 on a Tuesday morning, while she's reading her favorite blog on her laptop. She's almost forgotten she has a phone on her desk. And she's definitely forgotten to check her messages for days. Maria remembers a time when answering machines were a novel technology. Now they're fading fast. "Hello?" she asks tentatively.
"May I speak with Maria Bradstreet?" asks a female voice.
"Speaking."
"Ms. B
radstreet, this is the office of Doctor Ronald Chiklis, chief of endocrine surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Please hold for Dr. Chiklis."
Who the hell is Ronald Chiklis? Maria wonders. And why is he calling me? Oh yes: Jake's dad. But why doesn't he just pick up the phone himself? Or, better yet, send an email?
A male voice comes on the phone. "Mrs. Bradstreet."
"Yes, I'm Ms. Bradstreet."
"Ron Chiklis here, Jacob's father. How are you."
Maria has decided on a minimalist approach: "Fine."
"You're new at the school, correct?"
"Correct." Asshole. Maria knows what he's doing.
"I'm calling regarding Jacob's recent essay on the American Revolution," he says after a pause.
Maria has absolutely no recollection of Jake's essay, which she graded over the weekend and returned yesterday. That in itself tells her something: it was neither memorably good nor memorably bad. But Dr. Chiklis seems to think Maria will know exactly what he's talking about. She begins clicking around on her computer to the folder where she stores student comments. For the time being, she buys time in a way that always seems stilted and yet always seems to work: by paraphrasing what's just been said. "You'd like to talk about Jake's essay."
"Right. You gave the essay a B. I must say that I read the essay myself and thought it was a good deal better than that."
Maria smiles and resists the urge to say, "Is that so?" She's now found the comments and scans them, remembering the essay. "Yes," she says. "I'm looking at my notes. I said that it was a decent essay, clear structure, strong evidence, but that the thesis could have used a little development."
"Right," Dr. Chiklis says. "Jake's thesis was that the American Revolution was a struggle for power."
"Yes."
"I actually thought that was a pretty good thesis. I'm a bit of an amateur historian myself. Are you familiar with the work of Theodore Draper, Mrs. Bradstreet? I believe his book was actually called A Struggle for Power."
Maria is a bit surprised that the good doctor is citing this magisterial study. "Yes, I am," she replies. "Been a while since I read it, though." Dammit, she scolds herself, don't be defensive!
"Yes, well, I read the book on a long flight to China for an international conference a few years ago. I thought was rather good. Not as good as Gordon Wood's book, that first one, published back in '69, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. But very good. What I don't understand is how you could say that Jacob's essay was undeveloped, which I take to mean simplistic, when it's comparable to what Draper said in his book, which I regard as one of the best on the topic."
It's official: Maria's dander is up. Dad probably wrote the essay; if he didn't, he damn near shoved Jake into plagiarizing Draper. Maria's seen enough to see that he's a fairly passive kid, and here might be an explanation as to why. Probably the child of a second marriage. In any case, it's time to push back. "Yes, Draper's book is a major reinterpretation of the American Revolution," she begins. "But it's impossible to appreciate the force of his argument without putting it into historiographic context. Draper is actually responding to Wood. Wood is one of a number of historians who have emphasized the role of ideological forces in the coming of the Revolution; Draper's book is a self-conscious piece of revisionism borrowing from Marxist analysis that re-emphasizes materialist factors."
"Well that's all fine and good," Chiklis says. "But what does any of that have to do with Jacob? This is not graduate seminar, after all."
"No. It is not. And that's really my point. Jacob's thesis is superficially similar to Draper's, but lacks the rich sense of texture and historiography that makes his book the landmark you rightly view it to be. As matters currently stand, Jake saying that the American Revolution was a struggle for power is a little like saying that diabetes is a serious disease. Accurate enough, but not an especially insightful piece of analysis. That's why he got a B."
There's silence on the other end of the phone. Maria feels like she's landed an almost palpable punch.
"So what could he have done that would have been better?"
"Oh, any number of things," Maria replies. "His classmates made arguments like 'the American Revolution was inevitable,' or that it was the result of British ineptitude, or a blow for freedom, or whatever. Let me be clear: Jake's essay wasn't bad. It just could have been better. And it still can. I'd be happy to talk with him and give him a chance to revise it." (Him, she says silently. Not you.)
"Well, this is one of Jacob's problems. He's not proactive enough. That's why I'm calling. But I will encourage him to come talk to you."
"That would be fine." Him, not you.
"All right then," Chiklis concludes. "Thank you, Mrs. Bradstreet."
"You're welcome, Mr. Chiklis." Maria hangs up the phone. And sticks out her tongue.
In which a school year, and an experiment,
are declared complete
The F
elix Chronicles #36Kim: A (That's easy.)
Mindy: B (That's easy too.)
Mark: B- (That botched final exam really dragged down his average. He's been erratic in recent months. Gonna let the chips fall where there may there.)
Joey: B+ (The numbers say B, but would the class have been half as good without his humor? His jokes themselves were signs of engagement.)
Grading. The final act, a postmortem ritual that gets performed after everyone but the administrative staff is gone (and even their ranks are thinned and days shortened). I generally dislike assigning grades, because I think it's overly reductive to denote an entire semester's performance to a single letter. I also dislike grading because it seems to be that there's a core conflict of interest between being a coach and being a judge, and I regard a teacher's job as essentially the former. Coaches have to make judgments too, I guess, and rank their players competitively. But there's still a sense of a team, a shared enterprise, that's generally missing in grading. At least there's the factor of class participation, which typically looms large in my calculus, somewhere between 20-30% of a grade.
Of course, using a figure like that implies that in fact something like class participation is quantifiable. It isn't. And even those things that seem quantifiable, like test scores, are suspect in all kinds of ways. Grading simply can't be objective, and I really don't see too much point in trying. I've long decided that it is first and foremost a pedagogical tool -- carrot, stick, way of sending a message. There are flaws in this kind of thinking, I know. But there are flaws with the alternative, too, and in this situation as in so many others, you simply have to pick your poison. I try not to be reckless, honoring talent and punishing laxity insofar as I can perceive them. But grading seems like as good an arena as any for a child to learn that life isn't fair, at least as far as human beings can engineer it. Not that we shouldn't try.
Nate: A- (I don't really think he deserves it, but the grades say so, and I have to err on the side of disregarding personal feelings.)
Sam: A- (Part of me thinks he should get the A, but the grades aren't quite there, and I feel like there's a whiff of complacency about him that I'd like to see him prodded into overcoming, which I hope I'll get to do myself next year.)
Erica: B+ (Another late collapse. Could see this coming. Actually, B+ is a bit of a gift.)
Ellen: A (I'm simply going to disregard the 84% she got on the first test of the semester. It was an outlier. She'll obsess, fruitlessly, if I factor it in, and I told her to forget about an makeup assignment for extra credit.)
Chris: B- (He's been limping along all year. Last semester he got a B; I hope his folks will notice the deterioration.)
As far as I can tell, there are basically two grades at this school (and every other one I've worked at in the last twenty years): A and B. There are the gradations between them, and a big jump between B+ and A-. As my colleagues often say, you gotta work hard to get a semester grade of C or less, though I'll sometimes slap one on a weak essay. Students fail my exams all the time, but I can't think of a single instance where I flunked a kid for a whole course.
Alec: B+ (Love to make it higher, but can't find an excuse to do so. Again, this isn't about my affection for the kid.)
Samantha: A (if only I could make it higher!)
Beth: A (Ditto!)
Jason: B (He kinda slipped between the cracks. I feel bad about it. If I get another chance, I'd like to work a little harder to pull him in.)
Becky: B+ (She'll be mad about this, and I'm likely to hear about it. But it's what she deserves.)
Susan: A (Really shaky in terms of numbers. But she's been so reliable in class. And that research essay on Amelia Earhart was really terrific. She tells me she's already signed up for "U.S. Since 1945," and her Mom is lobbying to get me again.)
For me a class never seems to end so much as it fizzles. We get to the last week of May and we're chugging along into World War II. Then it's time for review, and we play a round of Jeopardy!, using the same set of clues every year. I give a class session over to discussing he final essay question, which I hand out in advance of the exam, but it usually runs out of steam about halfway through.. At the end of that last week we play a game of whiffle ball, which I enjoy very much -- I play very competitively and will be bragging for weeks about striking out Tom, star of the baseball team, with my curveball -- and savor the company of these kids, who will soon disperse. (It's when my team is at bat that I learn things like Becky's plans to study art at Bennington or Roy's ambitious plan to go to Antaractica.) And then I have a session where I just answer any questions they might have, a session which typically peters out. Then we have finals, and the class meets a final time on the last day of school, when I turn back exams and sign yearbooks. But it always seems anticlimatic. I always feel like a living organism is dying. I'll have many of these kids again, but never in this configuration. It makes me sad.
Lisa: A- (Pretty much a straight row of grades there.)
Liza: B+ (Never got to know her well, but academics are secondary now; she's a nationally ranked tennis player.)
Roy: B+ (Nice surge at the end there.)
Tom: B (He found Becky, and the clock, far more interesting than anything I ever said or did. Maybe he'll wake up next year.)
Unlike the seniors, all these kids will be back. As, God willing, will I. But I've decided that it's time to retire our friend Felix; the chronicle you're now reading will be the last of its kind.
There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that it's difficult to chronicle a school year during a summer vacation when there's no year to chronicle, as it were. I probably could keep this going for a while. For one thing, there's always been an element of imagination in this enterprise. I also had a backlog of pieces that I wrote before I started publishing them on this blog. You may have noticed that I've been running some of them, many of which are set in the fall months, here on the cusp of summer. But sooner or later, I'd find I had a dearth of material, real or imagined, to work with.
A more serious problem is attention of an unwanted kind. While I believe many, if not most, of the thousands of visitors I've had to my blog have kindly read my work with an understanding that I'm trying to capture aspects of everyday school life in a way that illuminates issues for consideration and reflection, there have been some indications that my posts have been fodder for gossip. Beyond that, I've always known that I've been walking a tightrope here. While I don't believe I've committed anything remotely resembling libel or slander, the possibility for misunderstanding and hurt feelings has always been a risk, one that only increases the longer I do this. I made the decision that the potential good in terms of honesty and clarity justified launching this experiment, but understood that my final responsibility is to my students and institution. I'm going to stop before I unambiguously cross a line.
I do so with some regret. I've enjoyed this project, and would like to see it continue. But I'm glad I did succeed in publishing three dozen of these pieces, and do hope they will be the foundation for further work of a similar kind in the futur
e. Please keep an eye out for it.In any event, I do intend to try and keep this blog going with pieces about teaching as well other subjects in the realm of American history in everyday life (I recently signed on to review books for the History News Network).
I'll end here with a few words of thanks: to my students and colleagues at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. To Felix Adler, the man who founded the institution, and in whose name these chronicles were written. And to you, dear -- and I do mean dear -- readers. Merely stopping by to say hello has been appreciated. But please know that you are welcome, now or later, to grade me on the work I did here.
And please continue to come by. I will labor to be worth your time.
JC
Coming soon: A postscript and the complete Felix Chronicles, with links, at this blog.
