Multiple Intelligences and Poetry Response

How we respond to reading is deeply personal. Although the author has a specific message he or she wants to convey, different people will receive that message in different ways. Our personal experiences shape how we understand and appreciate what we read, and no two people will read the same text in the same way. We also express ourselves in different ways when we respond to the world around us.

For my poetry unit, based on the anthology I Am the Darker Brother, I wanted my students’ responses to the poems to reflect that diversity, in reading and in response. I designed a project where they chose which poem(s) to respond to, what in the poems to respond to, and how they could to respond. I also wanted to honor the fact that some students do best when they have lots of small tasks, while others prefer a longer-term project. Building on our advisory curriculum of multiple intelligences, I made sure the various response choices would allow them to use different strengths. The final product was the compilation of response activities.

On the day the responses were due, I told my classes that this was a new project and I wanted their feedback so I could make it better for next year. The students appreciated getting to make choices and having a chance to incorporate their outside interests into a class assignment.

Here’s the assignment. The most popular choices were “poetry for dinner,” the artistic interpretation, and the remix. The only ones no one did were the skit performance and the choreography. Maybe next year!

All Those A’s

I have a student—let’s call him Mark. If I’d been grading writing like I did last year, using rubrics and points, Mark would be getting a B-, or maybe a B at best, in English for the trimester. I’m giving Mark an A.

I knew it would happen. I knew that if I went from rubric grading to a satisfactory-unsatisfactory approach, I’d end up with a boatload of A’s and A-’s when in the past, grades in my class fell on a pretty nice bell curve centered on B or B+. And I admit that giving Ben an A makes me wince a little bit. As great a kid as he is, his writing is fairly bad. But in seventh grade, even the kids who write well write badly. And, more importantly, I have to grade in a way that reflects my values:

• Process over product. My goal is not to produce 47 brilliant essays—if it were, I’d write them myself. My goal is to help my 47 burgeoning writers develop processes that work for them. Yes, everyone’s process should ultimately involve lots of revision, but there’s no one schema that will work for every writer, every time. I want them to experience what “process” feels like and decide what works for them. And, if I do value great writing, I need to promote the long process by which a seventh grader becomes a great writer.

• Subjective interaction between reader and writer over attempted objectivity in my own reading. There is no such thing as objective reading. Reading is an exchange between reader and writer. I want my students to understand that different people will perceive their writing in different ways so they, as writers, can learn to honor and accommodate that diversity.

• Learning over natural talent. Kids come to school to learn. Different kids come to my class with different amounts of natural talent (and pre-cultivated skill) in different areas. It’s not my job to see who’s a better writer than whom. My job is to make every kid a better writer by June than he or she was in September—and to want to learn how to write even more effectively after June.

• Student-teacher partnership over autocratic grade-giving. How are students supposed to learn how to assess themselves if I don’t give them a chance to assess themselves? And if the self-assessment is meaningless because they know I’m going to give whatever grade I give, why should they bother? And, who am I to be the final arbiter of their performance without getting some input and insight from them?

As I’ve explained elsewhere, I no longer put scores on assignments. Kids get either S (satisfactory) or U (unsatisfactory). If they’ve met my high standards, they’ve done satisfactory work. If not, they have more to learn, and after they’ve learned more, they can redo the assignment. As I expected, my new system of getting feedback from multiple readers and thinking about audience has led to more variety, creativity, and risk-taking in the students’ writing. I enjoy their papers more. But it doesn’t help me at the trimester’s end, when I have to assign a grade to each student.

What I did was, I had students reflect upon their trimesters. What did they learn? What do they need to work on? Here’s the survey they filled out.

Answer these questions thoughtfully and honestly. What did you learn this trimester? What were one or two of the highlights of English class? What are your strengths as a reader? Be as specific as possible. How have your reading skills improved so far this year? Be as specific as possible. What do you think you need to work on as a reader? Come up with 1-2 specific goals. What are your strengths as a writer? Be as specific as possible. How have your writing skills improved so far this year? Be as specific as possible. What do you think you need to work on as a writer? Come up with 1-2 specific goals. Comment on how you think you’re doing in each of these areas. Respectful Behavior Being polite; waiting your turn to speak Maintaining a positive and productive working environment Making sure you don’t distract others or disrupt the work environment Speaking respectfully, without putting others down or making inappropriate remarks Responsibility Bringing all materials to class Doing and turning in assignments Arriving on time to class Getting class notes and homework assignments when you miss class Participation Listening actively during discussions Taking notes as needed Contributing relevant comments to discussions Asking appropriate questions Commitment Following all directions on assignments Using guidelines to do well Making assignments challenging and interesting for yourself; taking them to the next level Focus Using class time wisely Staying on task Avoiding side conversations Circle the grade you think you should get in English, keeping in mind the following policies: 1. Your trimester grade drops for every unexcused late assignment. (“Unexcused” means you did not contact me BEFORE the assignment was due.) 2. If you have any never-revised “U” assignments or never-done work, you can’t get higher than a B- in English. The more unrevised U papers or missed work, the lower the grade. A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D F Explain why you think you should get this grade.

Students were astoundingly perceptive. I don’t know which impressed me more, when they picked up on strengths and weaknesses I noticed, or when they came up with strengths and weaknesses I hadn’t thought of. And they were specific in how they stated their strengths, achievements, and goals.

For the most part, I entered the grade students gave themselves. I bumped a few students up—mostly those who felt uncomfortable giving themselves A’s. And I bumped a few students down if they violated the late policy or the unsatisfactory work policy, or if their behavior in class made it difficult for other students (and themselves) to learn. My breakdown looked like this:

21 A

18 A-

3 B+

2 B

2 B-

1 C

So, they’re entered. They’re in the computer system for any of my colleagues to see, and they’ll be printed on the home reports for parents to read. And it feels scary, and it feels good, because I’ve fully and irrevocably committed a system of assessment that reflects my values.

Honoring Disagreement is Honoring Diversity

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 Rutgers University campus look like will surely have an easier time visualizing these details. (It doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, especially in this wonderful age of Google images, but it makes the reading experience feel different if we have to look up pictures versus if we have deep-set memories the book calls up.) How I think about a text will be related to my geographic roots, my education, my race, my religion, my gender, my socioeconomic status, my biases as an English teacher, my personal interests, and even—gasp!—my mood at the time of reading.

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. Reading. When Zach’s mother gets her copy of the report, she might read my words about Zach’s difficulties in English class and blame her ex-husband for not pushing Zach hard enough. People bring themselves to writing. The best I can do as the writer is be as aware of my audience as possible, anticipate possible interpretations, account for some, and knowingly ignore others.

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 Wilson’s suggestions.

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.

An Open Letter to Ben (Or, Why I'm Changing the Way I Grade Papers)

Dear Ben,

More than a year has passed since I read your essay about Holden Caulfield. At the time, it was one of 62 essays about Holden that I was reading; since then, I’ve read 63 more. Still, I remember that your essay applied something you learned in a YES Institute course: that Holden had a “listening,” or biased way of understanding the world, that got in his way. I confess I don’t remember much more about the essay—as I said, it’s one of 125 that I’ve read, and it was more than a year ago—but I do remember two more things about it. One, I remember loving it so much that I told several colleagues about it, and I gushed (which isn’t something I do easily or often) about how creatively you’d applied what you’d learned in one context to something in another context. That kind of interdisciplinary connection-making isn’t something you middle schoolers do too often (not that we teachers help as much as we should), and it’s very exciting when it happens.

Two, I remember the score I gave you: 44/50.

As you know, I graded the essay using a rubric. For everything of yours that I graded, I used a rubric. I don’t have the exact rubric I used for your essay, but here’s the very similar one I used for essays this year:

Paragraph 1: Introductory Paragraph ( /5)

· Introduction explains your topic in general and leads the reader to your thesis.

· Thesis is strong, clearly stated, and interesting.

Paragraphs 2-4: Body Paragraphs ( /10, /10, /10)

· Begin with a supporting argument that helps show your thesis is true.

· Give specific, well-chosen examples from the book that show the argument is true.

· Use at least 3 well-blended quotations that directly support your thesis.

· Explain how each example proves the argument in the paragraph.

· Remind the reader how all points in the paragraph relate back to the main thesis.

Paragraph 5: Concluding Paragraph ( /5)

· Summarizes the points you made in the essay.

· Explains why what you said matters.

Writing Style and Mechanics ( /10)

· Uses clear and precise language.

· Ideas follow each other logically, with clear transitions connecting them.

· Is free from spelling, grammatical, and stylistic errors.

TOTAL ( /50)

I’ve gotten very positive reviews of my rubric. Students, parents, and tutors like that it’s clear and specific. From the rubric and the detailed comment I give at the end, struggling essayists know what was expected, what they did well, and what to work on next time. I like the rubric too. It keeps me honest, keeps me from inflating grades. If the paper lacks clear points, sufficient textual evidence, and underdeveloped ideas, I can’t give it a B+ just because I want to.

Here’s the problem, Ben. Every time—and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME—I give a writing assignment, there’s at least one piece of writing that I want to give a higher score than the rubric tells me I should. (There’s also at least one that I want to give a lower grade than the rubric tells me I should. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Your year, for the Holden essay, yours was the one I wanted to grade higher. Your thesis was brilliantly creative and the paper was well-written. I could hear your voice in it. In a big stack of essays where some were bad and some were OK and some were pretty good, yours was by far the most interesting. If it weren’t my job to read essays, I wouldn’t want to read most of the essays I read. I’d want to read yours. So why didn’t you get a 50?

I was reminded of your essay while reading an article, an oldie but a goodie, called Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment, by a writing professor named Peter Elbow. Elbow examines three different ways teachers look at their students’ writing: grading the paper, analyzing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses in order to help the writer develop, and connecting to the writing. I have tried to make grades more meaningful by tying them to a rubric. Instead of slapping an A- on a paper because something about it appeals to me (or slapping a B- on it because something about it doesn’t), I measure the essay against important criteria of good writing. A good essay needs to have an interesting thesis; it needs to be well-organized so the reader can follow the ideas; it needs adequate support for the claims it makes. I look for those elements when I read students papers, and the score I put on the paper reflects the extent to which a student has measured up to the aspects of good writing I taught. In Elbow’s terms, I don’t just grade; I evaluate. The grade is merely a reflection of that evaluation.

Except, there’s another dimension of reading a paper. I’m not a paper-reading robot—although, when I have 60 to read, I sometimes feel that way. I’m a person. I connect with some ideas more than others. I enjoy beautiful turns of phrase. I love creative thinking that makes me pause and say, I never would have thought about it that way, or, what an interesting connection, or, YES! Reading your paper as a teacher, I gave it a 44 because it measured up to most of the standards I’d set, but according to the rubric, there were little things here and there that it lacked, or places where it needed more development, or something. (By the way, I don’t remember what was “wrong” with it. I hope you don’t either.) But, reading it as a reader, I enjoyed it. It put enough ideas in my head that I still remember the paper now.

Whenever I read anything, I write on it. When I read student essays, I write notes about the clarity of the argument, perhaps, or the effectiveness of transitions, or the development of the ideas. Evaluative comments. I write evaluative comments on other forms of student writing too: your stories, poems, dialogues, descriptions, and vignettes. I also write on published writing, but not for the purpose of grading it. I’m thinking about it. I wrote on Peter Elbow’s article: arguing with it, jotting down ideas for my own classroom and team meetings, asking questions, connecting his ideas to other articles I’ve read, noting my (rather strong) emotions. I write on fiction and nonfiction, for work and for pleasure, to note the questions and ideas and feelings and associations I make as I read. As a general rule, I like writing that gets me thinking, and the more I think, the more I scribble down. The sheer amount of commentary I write in the margins of a text is a rough measure of how much I like it. Maybe I should start reading student papers like I read everything else and give a grade based on how much I write. That would be a lot easier and a whole lot more fun.

Fun for me, but I wonder how it would affect you, and other students. What if you got back a paper, and instead of reading all the comments about what you did well and what you might have done differently, you got to read comments grappling with your actual ideas? There’d be responses to some of your thoughts and questions about others. You’d find out, through my reactions, where you’d reached me, where you’d convinced me, where you’d inspired me—and yes, where you’d confused me, where you’d bored me, where you’d failed to prove your point. You might come back to me and explain what you were thinking, so I’d get it, and I would say, OK, now go put that in your paper. We could talk about WHY I was confused. Maybe it was the lack of transitions. Or WHY I got bored. Maybe your thesis stated the obvious. See where I’m going?

Peter Elbow makes a startling point in his essay. He says that when teachers like a student’s writing, they find it easier to criticize. He says that when he doesn’t like the writing, he struggles to write comments, “trying to soften [his] criticism, trying to find something nice to say—and usually sounding fake, often unclear” (Elbow, 171). But when he actually likes the writing, when he’s excited about it, he’s also able to be more critical. I’ve discovered the same thing when I read papers. When I really love an essay, when it engages me as a reader and a thinker, I can give specific commentary on why I like it. At that point, I feel like I’ve established an intellectual relationship with the writer, like we are two scholars on equal footing, exploring an interesting idea together. On that equal footing, I feel entirely comfortable raising my objections to the organizational structure, or the wording, or the third paragraph’s content. And the student, who feels genuinely respected as a thinker, eagerly returns to his or her desk to make the writing live up to how much I like it.

I’ve seen it before. But I’ve also seen the opposite, when a student knows that even though he or she got a perfectly decent grade—thanks, rubric—I didn’t really like the paper. There was one essay this year that I remember reading, and though there was nothing really wrong with it and I think I gave it a 42, I just didn’t like it. The arguments were predictable and the prose was boring. It was fine, but it was boring, and I gave the B begrudgingly.

What’s weird about rubrics is what they do to me as a reader. I let the rubric make decisions instead of making them myself. Ben’s essay gets a 44 because he didn’t do x, y, or z. Walter’s essay gets a 42 because he didn’t do x, y, or z either, and he also didn’t do a couple of other things. Writing gets reduced to whatever categories I put on the rubric, and however thoughtful I was in designing those categories, their ultimate effect is still to reduce writing to x, y, and z. Writing isn’t algebra. (Even algebra isn’t algebra—there’s always more than one way to solve for x.) There are no formulas. There’s only me, the reader, you, the writer, and the spaceship of words that carries meaning from your planet to mine. Sure, I might not understand everything you say; I might even misunderstand, and everything you write gets filtered through the atmosphere of experiences, ideas, and biases I already have around me, not to mention whatever weather systems of feelings and thoughts are swirling around at the moment when I read.

But Ben, that’s what reading IS. It’s interactive. It’s as variable and diverse and messy as people are. I use my rubric to try to take all that messiness and make it neat and clean, but as I discover EVERY SINGLE TIME a pile of papers lands in front of me, that neatness doesn’t really exist. If it did, I’d be able to justify a C for Walter and an A for you. But then, if that neatness existed, I probably wouldn’t be an English teacher, because writing would follow easy formulas and would lack the richness and surprise that made me love writing in the first place.

So what happens now? Well, with the help of Maja Wilson’s excellent book Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, which echoes (or rather, presages) many of the ideas I’ve put down here, I am rethinking my entire system of assessing student writing? What possibilities are there beyond the rubrics that strangle my sensibilities? How can I grade (because I still have to grade) and make sure you get that A? And so very much more importantly, how do I honor the wonder and delight I felt upon reading your essay—the relationship we now have as reader and writer? I don’t think that volume-of-commentary system is going to fly, but I am committed to finding something that will.

Respectfully,

Ms P