I am grateful for our class reading in which Mamchur exposes the following six ‘evaluation traps’: 1. MEASURING WHAT’S EASIEST TO MEASURE, 2. UNDERSETIMATING THE LEARNING EMBEDDED IN EVALUATION, 3. REDUCTION, 4. UNEXAMINED POWER, 5. INEFFECTIVE FEEDBACK, 6. IGNORING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES.
When I reflect on my own experience somewhat painfully moving through the public education system, I would say that my education suffered most from traps (1) and (6). To a certain extent these are flip sides of the same coin. A lack of awareness or care for different ways in which students learn, may legitimize teachers’ tendency to evaluate only that which is easily measured. This always lead to frustration for me as I was a rather eccentric and perhaps even volatile learner! I have always been a person of deeply passionate curiosity, yet tragically undisciplined when bored. I am not proud of my inability to muster discipline to study that which holds no interest for me, but I have come to accept that unless and until I can find an ‘entry point’ for my curiosity then I will fail to produce any work worthy of appreciation. I wish with a great nostalgic longing that my elementary teachers had allowed me to explore the many subjects that I so loved: reptiles and amphibians and their habitats, and anything out of doors; how to survive in the wilderness; creating physical sculptures and buildings out of unwanted scrap materials; etc. I was an energetic, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist-environmental learner. How could my various inquisitive projects have been be evaluated? Well give me a chance to tell you what I’ve learned and I would offer it with exuberant dedication. No, I could not create a classically beautifuL poster, but I could build you something strangely symbolic of my project out of cardboard and scribe explanatory text over its rough surface. I had sadly been given such an inadequate and boring introduction to poetry that I hated English for it (an ‘education’ that utterly destroyed interest in poetry until I reached university and a refreshing professor with real light in her eyes unveiled the true beauty of poetic wordsmithing). However if a teacher who loved language had taught me poetry, I would have joyfully played with the language to create and speak aloud my learning progress.
Instead of any of this I received meaningless grades from an evaluator I didn’t trust or honour anyway. I teetered on the edge of failure in most classes until grade ten, when I started earning highest grades simply to smugly prove my intelligence to a doubtful teacher (this is a pathetic external motivation to ‘succeed’ academically, but it’s as much as I could muster in the education system that forced me through itself like so much digested fodder). I did not feel any room was made for my learning style in school. I don’t feel I yet know a solution, except frankly that more time and energy, more care must be dedicated to really knowing each student and honouring his humanity and natural joy in learning. For this classes should be smaller, interests should be encouraged and classic disciplines taught *through* them, and there should be an educational teaching team for every classroom. If the school system doesn’t allow teachers the time and energy to do this, well that shows where our societal values fail our students.
I will be a part of that system and hope to change what I can from within, but ultimately I expect I will fail some students along the way, just as I was failed by many teachers.
All I can do is struggle to really meet the students in my care where they are at, to honour their strengths and nurture their natural desire to learn, no matter how bruised and wounded this desire may be. I will explore with them how they might grow as learners and will listen to their questions and interests as sincerely as I am able. I will tell them how things look from my vantage point and hope to listen to their acceptance or rejection of my evaluations. I will try to explain what I think might be helpful, and will offer as much aid as they will receive. I hope to explore evaluation criteria together with my students, and leave room for accomplishments I could not have anticipated. So much of this cannot be outlined before entering the unique relationship with each student. I have my personal story and it shapes the sort of evaluator I will be. Always evaluating my own practices and looking for the strengths in my students should set the trajectory of my assessment practices.
-Mark Northey
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