Last summer I was visiting with a friend from my high school days who has also gone on to become a teacher in another province. It was one of those situations when I was talking about disliking marking, and suddenly realised that what I was saying was coming across more as a whine about work than as a thoughtfully worded criticism of our current system of assessment and evaluation.
I promptly shut up (no doubt he was thankful!) and have been thinking about the matter ever since.
So why do I hate writing report cards?
The basic premise of our report cards is problematic because it is based on a deficit system*. What we do is we compare our students to some idealized (and perhaps imaginary) standard, then look for how they fail to match it, and then use that as a justification for why, for example, a particular student "only" gets a B.
We can then try to smooth the grade over with all kinds of anecdotal comments, but as anyone can testify who has watched a student read their own report card, or who has, as a parent, read the report card of their own child, it's the grade that registers first. "Only" a B - then check the comments to see if there's any explanation as to why it isn't an A.
In recent years, the experts in my province's ministry of education (and I'm sure they're taking their cue from North American-wide trends) have attempted to allay the concerns of some educators by assuring us that our assessment/evaluation is merely a "snapshot of what the student can do."
That in itself is a problem. Why are we using a snapshot to describe a complex and emergent situation? And why must it be framed as a negative rather than as a positive?
(* This is from either William Pinar or Ted Aoki but I can't find the quote right now)
