QQ 7/18

From Daiker: “They wrote a total of 864 comments on the essays, but only 51 of them were comments of praise. This means that 94% of the comments focused on what students had done poorly or incorrectly, only 6% on what had been done well.”

If writing in the classroom becomes more collaborative and student driven is this negativity likely to change organically? If the instructor becomes less of a prescriptive force in the classroom in general it makes sense to me that the grading process would follow suit. Doesn't it make sense to model the collaborative, writing centered process through thoughtful teacher feedback on papers rather than just symbolic corrections?



From Elbow: “Another useful option is to make a strategic retreat from a wholly negative position. That is, I sometimes do a bit of ranking even on individual papers, using two "bottom-line" grades: H and U for "Honors" and "Unsatisfactory."


He goes on to explain the ways in which he justifies this kind-of ranking (“at the moment, anyway”) This felt like whiplash to me. He's just spent pages and pages tearing down the validity of ranking, and now he is re-packaging it and giving it back to us. Did anyone else feel like his “bit of ranking” was problematic to the rest of his argument? Why do this kind-of ranking rather than find another way to communicate with the students about their performance throughout the semester?