Posted for Mark

The problem with teaching language arts, as I have feared, is the pre-determined standards of correctness: or, rather, the lack of black and white guidelines for interpreting the skills of the student. In some way, I believe the notion is what attracted me to language arts in the first place. Understanding the complexities of assessment in our discipline leaves a lot of room for bad assessments.
When considering the objective of meeting a standard, we, in language arts, realize that a standard must be in place in order to achieve a measurement of some sorts of our students’ grasp of the subject-matter. But this standard only exists when we allow for the view points of someone—whether at the school or state level—to have credibility. I guess I am wondering what gives any one person or any panel the authoritative license to dub an interpretation or criticism of any literary work as a standard.
Even applying all the key factors in assessment, any teacher teaches any given child for one year’s time. Now at the end of one year’s time a general assessment is finalized and students either get to the top of—unless they’ve been there already—the class, get to the middle, or stay or fall to the bottom (the average, of course, being in the middle). But one year’s time cannot determine which student ultimately develops into a great writer over a longer measurement of time. And the fallacy of our assessment system is that it measures some “improvement” within a narrow framework of time, based on a standard that may or may not be valid. The rightness or wrongness of interpreting text is one thing. But the rightness and wrongness of expressing oneself by way of writing is another.
All factors of assessment have limitations. For instance, there have been many instances—as I have witnessed myself—which fly in the face of the predictability of one’s future performance in their later academic endeavors. Also, the issue of equity falls short with any given assessment in a particular group. The “fairness” factor necessarily falls short because of the endless amounts of differences between one student and the next.
So, gaining an “accurate” assessment of students’ abilities within small units of time—because this our most “efficient” way of doing so—categorizes students and artificially dubs them either good, average, or bad writers. I know, there must be some grading. But that one year’s assessment doesn’t stop after that one year, not for the student. They carry that “ranking with them. I apologize for the wordiness and hope my quantity did not out at least some quality. It is a manic day!