“maybe it sus”

[Hannah Piper]

One image from my tutoring experience which I believe will stick with me for a long time is the stark glimpse I got of my class when I lined up all of their final project posters for The Lord of the Flies.

Having such a broad overview of how these students synthesize information I watched them learn, and to be able to tell how much effort they put into it, what the quality of that effort resulted in, and how much they appeared to have enjoyed the process was extremely enlightening.  The illuminating experience wasn’t entirely an optimistic one, but has made me reconcile some previous judgements I regrettably held for students regarding their work.

Here, I am including some of the images which I included in a previous post, but which I would like to recap.

These two posters from the big pile of ~20 which have stuck with me the most.  For the first, pictured above, we have a student who carefully cut out tiny bits of construction paper to create highlights and shadows on individual figures from the book.  The analytic writing and charts don’t have nearly the same depth to them, but the layout of this poster has clear heart, dedication, and thoughtfulness poured into it.

This second image was the other poster which struck me the most.  Here we see a small patch of printed text comprising the substantive “meat” of the poster, pushed up to the top so that students would be able to draw some rather crude characters (save the random and impressive “Beastie” peeking out from stage right), complete with Piggy saying “maybe it sus.” I was both a bit disappointed as well as inordinately amused by this poster, and couldn’t stop thinking about the hilarity of how disjointed the finished slapdash project ended up.

However, as I have considered these two posters side-by-side, the disparity of how these two groups of students grasped the content of the story is maybe not as easy to judge as it would seem at first glance.  The characters at the bottom of the second poster aren’t expressing their development within the story entirely with inaccuracy; in fact, this poster seems to have a better grasp on individual characters than the first, where they comprise a faceless mass at the fire.  Likewise, the text reflects similar sentiments which the first poster did, even if they are as crude as the drawings.

From these posters, I have come to realize that there is a difference between carelessness and misunderstanding.  I have been questioning the core tenets of assessment in the classroom — if a key point of assessment for this project is to rate the students’ understanding, then the quality of the presentation might be completely at odds with the presentation by which understanding will be graded and judged.

I have learned from these posters that assessment is just so darn nebulose.  To make a core assessment of students’ knowledge, understanding, or synthesis, teachers must concede to multiple other criteria of assessment which students might struggle with — or which students might synthesize in ways which could seem unfair to grade on the same standard as other students who executed the task “better.”

 

This whole experience brings to mind Alfie Kohn’s staunch anti-grading system.  I have concluded from this experience that students would benefit from the abolishment of grades, because substituting motivation from fear with motivation for fun (which the second poster demonstrated) could wildly even the playing field for students by removing risk avoidance.

To explain myself: I am going to go out onto a limb and assume that the second group didn’t care too much about their grades going into the project.  I think that they simply wanted to enjoy themselves in this project,  but that they also demonstrated what was asked of them in the process — the very purpose of assignment and assessment.  Other groups’ finished projects, groups which appeared a bit more tentative, seemed stunted by what was asked of them, unwilling to take risks, and as a result, did not engage that deeply with the story.

Even though the second poster will likely receive a much worse grade, I believe that the students still demonstrated key understanding of what was asked from them, and with the teacher’s attention (undivided from judging them by a grade), their desire to learn could be stoked even further.

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