I believe person-to-person end of the semester conferences are extremely valuable and I plan to use them in my own future classroom. That said, I felt Bloom's essay spent more time ripping the current grading system than it did with her in-class experiences and evolving attitude. By the end, the problems she raised about the psychology of grading seemed too big to wave away with a single example and a cover-all appeal to the success of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (a program I do like). I found her commentary honest and usually helpful, and I'm glad her experiment yielded positive results. But questions like those presented in her summary -- What about freshman or grad students? What about unmotivated students in required (non-elective) courses? -- are with me still...
For now, the A - F system is what we have to work with and as young teachers we don't have much power to challenge and change that. There is some flexibility within (thank god) and the creative solutions we've encountered so far this semester seem helpful. But I wonder what it would be like for the English Department to embrace a unit-based grading system. One in which, at the end of the semester, an instructor makes a final determination of the unit value of a student's work. If the student's work is exceptional, she'd get the maximum units allotted. If she could benefit from more work in the subject, maybe she'd get some of the units. And for zero units (yikes!) the course would go unrecorded on the student's transcript. Each unit would be counted toward graduation and receiving less than maximum units for courses would imply that the student could benefit from either more practice or more discipline and determination in their next set of projects.
Additional note: I made early assumptions about the direction of Lad Tobin's essay "Reading Students, Reading Ourselves", and by the second page I was happily surprised. I thought Tobin was refreshingly self-aware and self-critical of both his person and occupation. I agree that we should not "underestimate our own creative and … idiosyncratic role" in the our student's writing. It was good to be reminded that the teacher is still the authority figure in a "de-centered," process-driven classroom, and that misreading meaning or possibility or potential into our students' work as "co-author" is important to their success.
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