Sometimes, while reading student papers, I have moments of self-doubt. I hand the offending work—this time, it’s Zach’s Of Mice and Men essay that I’m about to give a C+— to my colleague, Jeremy, and ask him, What would you give this paper? He skims it and says, I didn’t read it that carefully, and I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, so you’d know better than I would, but I’d say a B or a B+?
Jeremy is kind enough to give the string of qualifiers that honor my professional judgment, but at the end of the day, what does it mean for Zach when he gets a C+ on a paper that another English teacher—who teaches kids in the same grade at the same school—would have garlanded with a B+? I can’t say to Zach that he earned a C+ when the teacher who sits RIGHT NEXT TO ME would have said he “earned” a B+. But in fact, Zach didn’t earn a C+; I gave him a C+.
Not that I’m wrong to give the C+. He rarely explained his evidence, he integrated his quotations poorly, and he didn’t bother to address the second half of his thesis. And don’t even get me started on the grammar problems. I should have given the paper a C. But in Jeremy’s view, Zach had a interesting and personally-relevant thesis about how Curley’s wife’s asserted a false power because she lacked true power, and how this kind of dynamic exists among the so-called popular crowd at school. Zach also brought his own biting, slightly sarcastic tone to the paper. If you knew Zach, you could totally hear him speaking these words as you read them.
Had I been using a different rubric, say the 6+1 Trait® Rubric, or one that awarded more points for voice, creativity, and personal relevance, I might have given Zach the B+ that Jeremy would have given. But that’s not the point. The point is that Jeremy and I had very different reactions to this paper because he and I are two very different people. And why shouldn’t we be?
Right now, I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think is the most brilliant book I’ve read this decade. But I’m certain that there are people who wouldn’t like it. For one thing, the narrators use a lot of Spanish, and to understand it all, a whitegirl like me needs a background in Spanish and/or Spanish-English dictionary and/or Urban Dictionary and/or 33 years of knowing how to attack a word using context. For sure some non-Spanish-speaking readers would find all those Spanish words cumbersome to the reading experience. And though I wouldn’t know for sure, I’d bet good money that Junot Diaz thought about those readers and decided something like, “The Spanish is part of Yunior’s voice. I can’t take it out, and I can’t footnote every time. If some readers can’t deal with the Spanish, too bad for them.”
And that’s exactly the point! All writers make choices about who to include and who to exclude in their readerships. No writer writes for ALL readers. A text as universal as a New York Times article assumes a certain degree of formal education, worldliness, and familiarity with background events. Conversely, most writing is for more than one reader. In real life, the only time we write for one reader is when we write strictly for ourselves, as in a diary, shopping list, or notebook; or when we write strictly for one other person, as in a private email. Just think of the complexities when you decide, midway through writing, to cc an email: all of a sudden, you’re making subtle alterations to your tone, you’re asking yourself if you need to define a term, you’re deleting a joke. And that’s just for one extra person! Imagine how professional authors must feel negotiating the potential misunderstandings of their wide readerships. But they do!
With student writing, though, we make a funny compromise. We pretend students are writing for all readers—or at least all teachers. We pretend that any teacher could read their essays and give the same grade we did. We pretend that there is some measure of fairness to the way we grade. (For gorgeous proof to the contrary, just read the second chapter of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, by Maja Wilson.) At the same time, we know there’s only one reader this essay is written for. Sure, a peer reviewer or a parent might have a look, but the teacher is the Reader Who Counts.
In real life, much of what we write will be read by multiple readers, our readers’ contexts matter. A Dominican might appreciate the historical and cultural details in Oscar Wao more than I, who have only a very cursory and second-hand knowledge of its history and culture. Someone who knows what cane fields, the SDF-1, and the
How is that fair to students? How is it fair that my opinion of Zach’s paper depends on something as incredibly capricious as my mood? It’s NOT fair. But it’s also reality. When Zach’s dad reads my home report at the semester’s end, it will matter whether he opens the envelope after sitting through 90 minutes of traffic or after watching Zach win his season-opening baseball game. He’s not sitting there with the home report guidelines to help him figure out whether my comment is useful. HE, a real person, is sitting there.
The best I can do as the teacher is teach my students to know their readers for the messy, moody, opinionated, contextualized human beings that they are.
In her book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson spends an entire chapter discussing the fact that readers disagree about writing all the time, and that this disagreement can be very helpful to writers when they examine WHY different readers disagree. Forget the grades; WHY did Jeremy and I have such different reactions to Zach’s essay? Zach might learn that Jeremy used to teach a course on comedy, while my law school background has made me meticulous about logical organization and thoroughness in proving a claim. Then—and here’s what’s really important—Zach can make DECISIONS about how to revise. (When Alfie Kohn spoke at my school, he said something that stayed with me: “Children learn to make decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”)
What does that look like? After reading Rethinking Rubrics, I’ve decided to try some of
Let’s say Zach just finished a draft of his essay. In a peer review session, two of his classmates will use Ted Nellen’s “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method to tell Zach (a) what they got out of the piece; (b) what struck them about it; and (c) what left them confused or curious, or any suggestions they have for revision. I’ve created a chart version of the “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method that we can use in class.
Next, Zach has to find two adult reviewers who will also use the “I heard, I noticed, I wondered” method. He can use his parents, his other relatives, his parents’ friends, his godforsaken tutor—whomever he wants. If a student doesn’t know any adults who can fill that role or doesn’t feel comfortable asking, I’ll give them mentors. (My big fat plan is to see if, at a nearby retirement home, there are people with time on their hands and wisdom in their heads. A reversal of good old community service. But I’m not there yet.)
Now, Zach has comments from four different reviewers—some his age, some older; some in his family, some not; some who know him well, some who don’t; some who did a similar assignment, some who don’t know what the assignment was. These different readers have brought their own subjective ideas, both about the content of the essay and about essay-writing itself. They’ve brought their backgrounds, biases, and moods. They’ve brought themselves. How does Zach “extract clarity from disagreement through careful study of readers’ context and [his] own purposes?” (Wilson, p. 65)
He can put all the feedback in one place (my very slightly modified version of Maja Wilson’s “Dealing with Disagreement in Response” chart on p. 97 of Rethinking Rubrics) and then make sense of all that feedback by finding common themes among the comments, thinking about his readers’ different perspectives, and using those perspectives to guide his revisions.
In real life, some writing is for only one reader. But essays are not meant for one reader, and I don’t want to be the one Reader Who Counts. I want to teach students that honoring disagreement is honoring the diversity of backgrounds, opinions, biases, interests, and moods that readers bring. I want my students to learn, in short, that readers are subjective and that writers need to make decisions that will ultimately include or exclude readers. I know the process is going to be messy, but that shouldn’t be what stops me.
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