What assessment will you use to help you choose materials for your class?

When I heard it, I wondered how I would answer it. I also wondered what the question implied.

I think the intention of the question was to get a new teacher candidate to think about how to assess varying reading levels of students in order to choose appropriate materials, but I’m not quite sure.

I have heard the word assessment in a variety of contexts in our district a lot in the last couple of years. I used to think it was a new, less emotionally crippling word than “test,” which can, by its very utterance, push anxiety ridden students to the edge. But now I think the word assessment means much more. I’m just not sure what it always means.

The question was compelling for a couple of reasons, but the first thing it made me think of was that there may actually be a test that could be administered to let a teacher know what materials to select for a class, and that, somehow, disturbs me.

The question was the seed for a wild notion in my overactive imagination. I imagined a government/corporate conspiracy where teachers are just embodied voices, symbols really, channeling pre-designed curriculum, using pre-made assessments, handing out provided materials, all of course chosen for some larger purpose. That of course is ridiculous, right?

I have, over the last ten years or so, worried that the role of the imaginative, creative, thinking teacher has been diminished nearly to the point of irrelevance. And the implication of a test to tell me what to teach only amplified that fear. How do I choose materials for my class, after all? How do I assess the situation?

I want to think that the relationships I develop with my students help me know what is right for them. I want to think that my knowledge, expertise, and experience help me know what will work and won’t work for my students.

And yet I recognize that all of that takes time. It takes time to get to know my students, especially my freshmen, who are all new to our school. I takes time for me as a teacher to become experienced. What about new teachers? It takes time for us to all learn how to learn together. Maybe some students cannot afford all this time.

Our student population is less and less homogeneous all the time, in terms of their ability to learn. We have students entering ninth grade who read at a 12th grade level or beyond and some who struggle to read at a 4th grade level. How do I manage that?

The truth is, even if there were a test to tell me which book is best for a particular student, I would still need to make daily choices about how to connect with him or her.  When I recognize frustration,  disappointment, and struggle, I must decide how to manage it. I must decide the next step, the best way to make things better. And all of this takes time.

But that is the art of teaching, the art of assessing the situation. And that human interaction, that human connection is why teachers can never be irrelevant and why no test can tell me as much as I need to know about my students.

What students begin to see are patterns and repetitions, which are, of course, (theoretically) clues to the meaning of the passage. I ask students to consider dominant patterns. Ask them to discuss what they might mean.

I copied the url for Google News into Wordle because I wanted to see if any dominant patterns would emerge.

I don’t know about you, but to me, the news seems to be filled with violence. Just “wordling” the news daily would be a great springboard for discussion.

But it would also be a good tool for finding dominant word patterns in a literary passage.

I sometimes just click around and the places I land are in random succession. I began tonight at Technorati, checking things out, looking at my favorites and what they’d posted lately and I found myself suddenly at Stanford’s Philosophy Talk website. Still being a little annoyed that they have begun to charge for podcasts, I clicked on the link to their page for podcast subscriptions and, da da, I found myself. Me. Lil’ ole me. I had to double check, but sure enough, they summarized my endorsement of them as beneficial for schools and students and published it on that page. It was taken right out of my post titled Philosophy, Podcasts and Me.

Here’s what I said (copied and pasted from their page):

“Philosophy Talk podcasts are perfect tools for schools… Students have access to great discussions from one of the most respected universities in the nation.” Dawn

I love Philosophy Talk. The lectures are wonderful, engaging, and transport me to the world of ideas that I lack so much in my daily life.

What I don’t love is the idea that they’re charging for this experience now. I even told them as much. In their option to submit a conundrum I asked if charging for philosophy podcasts, which are a democratic force, is a paradox. Give it to the people!! What would Socrates have said about a subscription fee?

Well anyway, the ultimate irony is that I find myself on the very page that promotes their subscription service as evidence of its value. I do realize the further irony in that writing about this experience I am promoting them even further. What would you call that? Is there a term for that?

I imagine I won’t subscribe. I can’t really afford it. And, to be honest, I’ve gotten used to getting some amazing things (This American Life, The Writers Almanac, etc.) for free via podcasts. So it goes against my values now to think that I should pay.

Still, it’s funny to find myself an unwitting sales agent. But beyond that, I am simply flattered to have had Stanford University as MY audience, if only for a little moment.

Cool!

Being the English teacher I am, I started with the episode on the Language of Fiction. Where was this discussion when I was writing my masters thesis for Lakeland? They were talking about all the ideas I was grappling with in that paper, all those years ago.

And then they even got around to this question (paraphrased): Does reading fiction create more moral people? My thesis question!

I’m not sure they answered that question; in fact they sort of skirted it. Well not really, but they didn’t answer it. Did I?

I think that books, fiction, when they are art (or moral as John Gardner says), give the reader, if he or she is ready for it, an experience in life that not only instructs, in a way, but more importantly, gives the reader a way of living life in pain, sorrow, or whatever it is, that is safe. And yet, this same experience is one we can learn from. What we learn is what it means to be human. We also can discover who we are in that human experience.

What I teach my students about books is that the stories of characters we care about matter. Those stories can change us. Those stories can make us better people, better in the sense of being more fully part of the universal and timeless human experience.

Still, of course, each person’s set of values is shaped by more than the books he or she reads.

But what can we know more deeply by reading fiction, great or good fiction? I think the gamut of human emotion, certainly.

In my thesis I listed the qualities I believe great books (and I meant fiction) embody. I have excerpted that list below.

Qualities of Great Literature

The following list is mine, though what I think is influenced by Gardner, Adler, Booth and unnamed others as well as my experiences as a reader and as student and teacher of literature. If there were a checklist one could apply to literature to measure its greatness, the debate about what is good and great would end. Of course there is no such thing. The qualities I propose here seem to me to be complete, though no doubt, as I look upon them again in the future, I will want to add or change what I think are essential qualities of great books.

• A great book shows us what it means to be human (and thereby connects us to each other).
• A great book shows us how to be better at being human. It shows us who we could be and how we could be better.
• A great book expresses great ideas, ideas that have engaged philosophers throughout history.
• A great book helps readers know more fully what beauty is, or truth, justice, honor, compassion, courage or love.
• A great book recognizes the value of life and honors it.
• A great book recreates archetypal stories for new generations to understand and own, remaking ancient heroes into contemporary heroes.
• A great book is over our heads. It challenges our thinking, inviting us to reread. We continue to be enlightened by a great book.
• A great writer is an exceptional wordsmith. Language as metaphor, imagery, and sound reveals truth.
• A great book changes us intellectually. We emerge from the experience knowing something we did not know before. We experience a cognitive realignment. The best books will leave us desiring to know more.
• A great book changes us emotionally. To be compassionately engaged in the lives and the conflicts of characters enriches us.

Well, beyond my astonishment at having a year of my intellectual life being replayed in a one hour podcast and having that year and those ideas validated (because to tell the truth, some of those for whom I had to defend that thesis thought it was fluffy and irrelevant) , I am also astonished (nothing new here, but I continue to be) at the value of the Internet and the various ways smart and creative people use it to learn and grow.

These philosophy podcasts are perfect tools for small Midwestern schools like ours to expand our resources, to leap beyond what we may have been able to think and talk about when our resources were limited to the books we could afford.

The Internet democratizes education in this way. Sheboygan Falls students have access to great discussions from one of the most respected universities in the nation.

Wow! And Yippee!!

Now, as I look to the list of what to listen to next, I can’t decide. But what I know for sure is that there is a discussion to fit every aspect of what we talk about in our classes. The uses are limitless. I hope my students will be as excited as I am.