When Dr. Zamora kept talking about our blogs and how in due time she would know who’s blog was who without seeing the name based on the voice in the blogs. I found that to be interesting, because for one those are a lot of blogs but even though the majority of us are writing on the same topics and ideas, it is not only our views that she is reading but it is our voice that is essentially projecting through. I never realized how my voice may be read or perceived in my writing but it is clear that I do have one.

Some highlighted points in the reading that I happen to find interesting or agree with where how Peter Elbow mentioned how voice is an important dimension of text, everyone has a voice. Voice equals power. Which is a huge statement to make and definitely resonates with me on how important our voice is on and off paper. He also mentions how writers should care less on what teachers with find right or wrong but focus more on what readers will think of the kind of person the writer is. I agree and disagree with this. Yes that is true but I believe this should just be an overall umbrella idea to keep in mind and nothing to obsess over. If we as writers start to put too much importance on anything, I feel like we can loose our “voice.” I think we should keep the readers on the back burner of our minds but not make it our overall focus. It is important of what they think of us to be, but it is not everything. If they agree or disagree is up for the reader to decide but as the writer we should write, share what we believe and keep our voice alive. They will either like it or not just the same way as a teacher will find it right or wrong.

So I know that most people have seen Chimimanda Adichie’s Ted Talk before, but this was my first time watching “The Danger of a Single Story,” and now I get what all the hype is about. Adichie is an amazing story teller, and her lecture really highlighted how ‘single story’ mentality can be damaging not only to young readers, but to adults, as well.

The first story she tells, about how she only read books about blue-eyed, white people when she was young, proves just how important authentic representation is. Last week, diversity in literature was the topic of our Writing Literature for Children and Young Adults class, and through our discussion we realized that most of us had not encountered diverse characters in children’s books when we were growing up. I realize how lucky I was to have seen people who looked like me in almost every book I read as a child. And while there’s definitely been an increase in the number of quality diverse children’s books available since I was learning to read almost 30 years ago, we’ve still got a long way to go.

Later in her speech, Adichie talks about how the ‘single story’ has lasting effects well into adulthood, such as with her college roommate, or the professor who told her that her stories weren’t authentically African. Even educated, well-meaning adults fall into the trap of the ‘single story,’ without even acknowledging the possibility that maybe the information they’ve been told for so long could be inaccurate. The story of Adichie’s professor especially stuck with me, and reminded me of another author who had a similar experience. During our memoir unit, my students read Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas, who was originally told that her stories didn’t reflect the “true” immigrant experience because there was too much humor and not enough violence and devastation. Like Adichie, it wasn’t that Dumas had never experienced any hardships or dangerous situations; she just chose not to make those the focus of her writing. Most of what students have to read at the high school level is quite dark and depressing, and it makes me wonder how many other books like Funny in Farsi we’re missing out on because publisher’s don’t feel they’re “authentic” enough.

What I appreciated most about Adichie’s speech is that she fully admitted to falling for the ‘single story’ narrative herself. She speaks of going to Mexico and the shame she felt when she realized that she had let the media coverage of immigration fool her into believing the ‘single story’ of Mexicans. The fact that someone who knew the dangers of the ‘single story’ of their own culture subconsciously developed a ‘single story’ of another culture proves that we’re all human, and no matter where we come from and what our experiences are, we have to actively learn how to not take everything we see/hear at face value. Adichie could have very easily not shared this story with us, but she chose to take ownership of her mistake, and learn from it, with the hopes that others would do the same.

I want to finish up by saying that this Ted Talk gave me a great idea for an exercise to incorporate into my multi-cultural unit. I’m going to share this video with my students, and invite them to share the damaging ‘single story’ that people believe about their cultures. I think it will make for a very enlightening class discussion.

I believe the initial danger of the single story is the lack of dynamic characters which, as a result, makes the whole narrative flat. It’s the multiple perspectives and the intersection of those perspectives that creates the plot of a narrative. It’s kind of how last week’s readings looked down upon an “acceptance of a single set of standards” (Elbow).

We’ve also discussed the danger of the single story in our Children’s LIterature class & it always comes back to the issue of representation. If a reader sees themselves within a character, whether it’s because they are described with the same physical attributes or personalities, it makes it easier to connect to the narrative as a whole. I guess this brings in the idea of empathy & authenticity within the narrative too.

It’s hard to feel empathetic towards a character you’re disconnected to. Like I said, feeling represented by a character in someway creates that connection. BUT, the way the author chooses to go about representation plays a role in a narrative as well.

For example, if a white author creates a character of color for the narrative, it’s very easy to tell whether those intentions were genuine or for marketing purposes. Once that false intention is detected, it automatically sits in the back of my mind for the rest of the narrative and disconnects me (personally) in someway. If an author wants to correctly represent a person within a character, there has to be research done prior to doing so. They can’t let stereotypes do the thinking for them. That only encourages authors to fall back on the same, redundant characters and keeping the narrative flat/ inauthentic.

This has to do with power too. The speaker says, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person,” and, in literature, the author holds that power. With power, comes great responsibility and accountability, in some cases.

Circling back to empathy, all narratives are inherently created to bring out empathy from its reader. Once you read those first few lines, you are placed in the character’s shoes or, at least, their world almost automatically. It’s the authenticity that will keep a reader there to follow along the journey and feel whatever emotion is floating around in the narrative. They will hurt or rejoice with whoever is feeling that emotion in that world.

Empathy is also what keeps a story with the reader for, maybe, all of their lives. The strong emotion and connection to those emotions remain and make the narrative memorable, along with its characters.

I’m going to start out with Elbow because a lot of his points resonate with the methods Bean tries to implement. First, evaluation. This is basically the backbone of Bean’s methods, which is probably why I can agree with most of it. But, as Elbow mentions, there are still issues to be found in it and it’s mostly to do with the inability to reach agreement.

Elbow essentially highlights the fact that the only way we’d be able to reach an agreement as to what is good or not is to do so in an artificial way, that is, through a system which is learned or an “acceptance of a single set of standards”. A very robotic and inhumane approach. Unfortunately, we’re too complicated & opinionated as humans to adopt such a system but, in a way, that is was ranking tries to do. Elbow questions the value in it and rightfully so.

If we all wrote the same argument, is it even an argument?

The immobility within the ranking system is prevalent too. It’s a big “yes” or “no,” that we fight and work hard for. There’s no “maybe” to consider. Bean’s writing talks about the discouragement that comes from such negative feedback. They use the example of mitigated versus non-mitigated comments, which is the same idea behind ranking. Once a paper receives a stamp of disapproval (without further explanation) that student is discouraged from the get go. I’ve seen it happen too many times with my peers and myself.

My best friend is dyslexic and she DESPISED any kind of English classes because teachers would obviously be aware of her dyslexia and would grade her paper with grammar mistakes at the forefront of their minds. I only know because I would read all of her papers AND other students’ papers as well. Others had just as many grammar mistakes, if not worse, but their papers were graded higher. It would frustrate anyone.

This brings me to the idea that this numerical ranking system very easily takes away from the learning factor. The discouragement quickly clouds that. In her case, she would revise drafts with grammar in her mind & pay no mind to the actual argument. A teacher pleaser. I’m just as guilty.

Elbow talks about frauds and that’s what I struggled with for the longest in my academic writing. I was the epitome of a teacher pleaser. I knew exactly how to read a rubric and apply it to any essay with ease. I really think this is why it took me so long to consider myself a writer. I was getting these A’s on papers and, after a while, it felt redundant & ingenuine. It’s not until now that I’ve realized it was because I never had my voice in any of those papers. I was molding my words using whatever teacher’s instructions or rubrics I was handed.

Bean touches on the importance of emotions to learning, which is an extremely valid point. It’s easy to think academic writing is robotic, but there IS emotion and tone in it too. My writing was lacking that.

It definitely had to do with the fear or anxiety that comes with “the teacher won’t like me,” or “they see no hope in my thoughts or ideas,” and it’s sad to look back at it with clear vision now. I think it’s important to mention that power dynamic between student and teacher that is integrated within our school systems because, truly, that’s where this all stems.

I’m grateful these are issues becoming more apparent, but I can only hope we can lean towards Elbow’s more realistic approach of finding that sweet spot between ranking and (genuine) evaluation.

I also found this essay to be an interesting read as it put much of my thoughts into perspective. So far with these readings, like the last one; I find them to be relatable and often have a connection of memory from growing up and being a student in elementary and high school. Like my previous blog, I found myself agreeing with this essay as I would always get different scores on my papers compared to my peers growing up. However, in college that was not an issue.

While most of the time if I received a different score either good or bad compared to my peers often times there would be comments and suggestions left by my educators explaining why. Most of the time it was because I didn’t properly follow the rubric as suggested. But the scores always made me nervous. If I scored high, I felt great and felt like I achieved something amazing. But when I would score low, I felt ashamed and upset. I would obsess over that score and read my peers papers to understand where I went wrong. But I always found it weird to give scores on writing. If you answered the prompt and did the actual essay itself shouldn’t that have been enough?

Writing in general is creative even if the assignment is not considered creative writing. To hear someone else’s thoughts and their takes on something is unique and beneficial. Why do we grad it and obsess over scores? Grading should be more focused on grammar and set up on the overall paper itself. Not the actual content. Unless maybe a student is way too far off.

I want to start by saying that both of the readings this week helped me identify ways in which my own feedback on student work is either lacking, or creating more work for me rather than the students. I appreciate the value that both of these pieces had for me as an English teacher, and I’m looking forward to incorporating some of Bean’s and Elbow’s suggestions into my own feedback practices.

Reading 1: “Writing Comments on Students’ Papers”

Bean reiterated something I’ve known about myself for a long time, and that’s the fact that I provide way more criticism on student work than positive reinforcement. It’s something I’ve been trying to improve over the past few years by playing around with different feedback techniques, but I feel like now I’ve got some strategies that may actually work. For one thing, I’ve never really thought about how the students feel when they’re reading my comments, and that really opened my eyes to the value of positive reinforcement. It also got me thinking about how I never really sit down with the students and explain what different comment on their papers might mean. I just assume that if they don’t know, they’ll ask, which I now realize is not always the case, especially with students who feel badly about the work they’ve produced.

The suggestion to not point out every single thing wrong with a paper reminded me of “focus areas,” a concept promoted by the Collins Writing Program, who ran a professional development session I attended about seven or eight years ago. Their idea was that by only grading students on a 2-3 “focus areas” per assignment, they wouldn’t get overwhelmed by trying to improve every skill at once. The goal was that eventually the first few “focus areas” would become second nature, and then students could always be held accountable for them. This made sense in theory, but not so much in practice. Students (and parents) would complain that since something wasn’t a “focus area” for that assignment, how could they lose points for getting it wrong? Instead of making students more accountable for a growing list of skills, it made them pick and choose which ones they would care about for any given assignment.

I like that Bean provided a hierarchy of questions to ask about a piece of writing, because it’s helpful for both teachers and students in terms of prioritizing what kind of attention needs to be given to the piece. I think that list can also be modified to use as a peer editing tool, where students have to go over the checklist with one or two classmates first, before even submitting a draft to the teacher. I also really liked the concept of the the “old/new contract,” which is something I’ve always seen students struggle with, but I never had the right wording to explain to them how something could be improved. This is definitely something I’m going to introduce in my classes this year.

As far as grammar and stylistic errors go, I like the idea of simply marking the line in which an error occurs, rather than circling all the errors on the draft. It holds the student much more accountable for not only fixing their mistakes, but not making the same ones on future assignments. I also think I need to have a discussion with my students about the difference between grammatical and stylistic errors, because I don’t think they know the difference.

One thing that surprised me with Bean’s method of feedback is just how long his end comments are. I tend to leave comments throughout a paper, so I rarely feel the need to leave more than 2-3 bullet point comments at the end to sum things up. He goes so in depth with this comments, it’s really impressive. However, it’s also not always practical, and that’s because of the age old dilemma: time. There is simply never enough of it. First off, most of my students’ assignments don’t go through a multi-draft writing process. I usually give them 2-3 days to compose their essay in class, followed by 1-2 days of peer editing, during which they can come to me with specific questions/concerns, but I don’t typically read all of their drafts. The other timing issue is with the actual grading timeline itself. Let’s turn it into a word problem:

Ms. Chuntz has 80 students’ essays to grade. Ms. Chuntz’s supervisor says all assignments have to be graded within one week of their due date. If Ms. Chuntz is trying to maintain a healthy work/life balance and not take any grading home with her, how many minutes per essay does she have if she only grades during her allotted 45 minute prep period?

5 prep periods x 45 minutes each = 225 minutes

225 minutes /80 essays = 2.81 minutes per essay

That’s not even enough time to read the first page. And so the real answer is that concessions have to be made, and the students (and teachers) suffer for it.

Reading 2: “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgement”

Where Bean neglected to take into account the lack of time present in a teacher’s day (and yes, I get that he was writing as a college professor who probably has fewer students, more prep time, and no soul-crushing responsibilities like lunch duty), Elbow’s suggestions are much more easily adaptable for a teacher who doesn’t even have enough time for a bathroom break most days.

The drawbacks he identified when it comes to ranking are absolutely true. It doesn’t matter how foolproof you think a rubric is, the following will always be true: 1.) Every student and teacher will interpret that rubric in a different way; and 2.) There will always be at least one student who screws up interprets the task in ways you could never have imagined, and therefore doesn’t fall into any box on the rubric. And yet the fact remains that it would be impossible to give up ranking without a total overhaul of the entire education system. (Although it is entertaining to imagining the looks on the faces of frantic students and overbearing parents if you told them traditional grades or GPA were no longer a thing.)

Some of Elbow’s ideas that I do think could be successfully incorporated into a high school English classroom are the minimal ranking (honors/unsatisfactory/satisfactory), the strong/okay/weak grid, and evaluation-free, or low stakes writing assignments. I think the grid and the minimal ranking would be helpful for shorter graded assignments and for drafts of longer assignments. Evaluation-free writing is something I’ve been trying to incorporate more in the last few years, through journals, quick writes, and do nows/bell ringers. One of the problems with that is many students simply won’t complete an assignment that they know isn’t graded, so even if I’m not grading it for content or correctness, I still have to hold students accountable by grading it for completion, even if it’s just 5-10 points.

The writing activity I really want to try is having students share more of their writing with peers, whether that’s out loud, or through comments left on their writing. This activity reminded me of my own 8th grade English class, where we would respond to a journal prompt every Friday, and then our teacher would collect our notebooks and randomly hand them back out to the class, so that we all got a chance to read and comment on someone else’s response. I’m not sure how receptive my students would be at first to someone they’re not close with reading their writing, but I think it’s something I can play around with during our memoir unit.

I want to end this blog post with a mostly unrelated observation about the randomness of word association and my brain. All week long I was thinking ‘bean and elbow, elbow and bean’ and my brain came to the only logical conclusion it could: soup. How, you may wonder? Well, Bean(s) + Elbow (macaroni) = pasta fagioli! So, that’s what I made for lunch this week!

I found this week’s readings, Writing Comments on Student Papers by John Bean and Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement by Peter Elbow to be pretty interesting and thought-provoking. Writing, be it academic or creative, can be difficult to grade and/or evaluate. My personal experiences with peer-editing in classes and serving as a beta-reader for peoples’ creative work have given me a glimpse into what the writing grading process must be like for teachers and professors, and I definitely experienced its difficulties. However, as a student, there’s nothing more disheartening than pouring a ton of work into a paper, handing it in, and only receiving a letter grade back. It makes you wonder if the teacher/professor actually even read your paper or if they only skimmed it, and it’s easy to feel frustrated. Why bother putting in so much work researching, drafting, editing, and polishing if your work is not even going to be read? With creative work, which can be even harder to evaluate than academic work because of the lack of a thesis or “goal” (besides the goal of telling a coherent story), not getting feedback could make it feel impossible to improve that specific piece of writing or your future works. So, I feel pretty strongly that written feedback beyond grades is necessary, but how can it be done in a way that helps writers to grow and improve? These two articles do a great job of laying out some foundations and ideas.

Bean’s article focuses itself on academic writing and probably gives some of the best advice on grading such work that I’ve ever seen. I particularly like his idea of focusing on higher-order issues, such as the organization of ideas, first before moving on to lower-order issues like spelling and grammar. When writing a long piece, including creative works like a book, writers often get caught up in worrying about grammar and word choice on a sentence level instead of focusing on ideas, organization, and simply getting the draft done. I like that Bean’s grading reflects the best practice when it comes to drafting writing, which is to focus on the big stuff before you move on to sentence-level editing.

Bean’s idea of including the good along with the bad is also very helpful. It’s something I’ve learned is important when beta-reading, and something I appreciate having done with my own writing as well. I want to know what to improve, certainly, but I also want to know what parts you enjoyed so I can know where I’m on the right track and also not get hopelessly discouraged. Both of these aforementioned aspects of Bean’s work can be applied to both academic and creative works, even if the bulk of his piece is focused on academic writing.

Elbow’s ideas can apply to evaluating/grading any sort of writing. I like his belief that there is too much of a focus on number/letter grades when it comes to assessing written works, which are hard to appropriately give such a grade to anyway. Writing can be so personal and unique (think, for instance, of the importance of a writer’s voice) that it can be hard to evaluate. And when it comes to grading a student’s work, not liking their writing, because of style or subject matter or their stance on an issue, should not affect the grade, but it can be hard to ignore your personal opinions when grading and assessing.

I like Elbow’s’ grid idea for evaluating a work as a way of satisfying a student’s need for ranking while not giving a conventional grade. Likewise, portfolio grading and comments (well, you already know that I love comments) seem very helpful. Bottom-line grading is an interesting idea, though I think even that would be unhelpful without explanatory comments (a student would find themselves wondering why they got a check and not a check plus, for example). The unevaluated writing times and assignments are great too, and I’ve had plenty of personal experience with writing during class time with no expectation of a grade; it’s comforting and allows me to express myself more freely.

One point that Elbow makes that I really want to touch on is his statement that “We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it.” This has been very true for me personally. I gained a lot of confidence in my writing only after I realized that close friends of mine genuinely enjoyed reading it and saw its potential. If friends, family, and teachers never expressed an interest in my writing, I doubt I would have carried on with it. This is partially why I think it’s so important that teachers leave meaningful comments on student writing and learn to assess it beyond just giving it a grade; it is through this that I believe one can really foster and support a love of writing in students.

Here is my presentation paper. Looking forward to being in discussion about Nathalie Lawhead’s EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK with everyone tonight.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nMN9QzgBU34ciclw3X-zqxVO_zkchxMjfzsvjHuQIoE/edit?usp=sharing