i'm going to tell a story.
bear with me;
at some stage i have a slightly relevant point to make.
about 12 or 13 years ago i was a sophomore in high school, and i had to take a required literature class. somewhere along the way it became a lot of writing. i can't remember exactly, but weekly 5-page essays sound like the right workload.
our lit teacher had an odd grading system: 1 through 4, with +/- variations. [1] often i wondered whether i should switch out of that class and into another; 3's and 3+'s and 4-'s were getting to me. it was practically impossible to get a 4+. i remember earning one once, and it still cost me a good share of red ink.
that was the odd bit;
nobody's paper ever went unscathed.
everything she noted was in fact an error; i'll grant her that. it was always a mistake either in grammar, style, or even logic. she must have used red felt pens by the case. after one student complained about the stigma of red ink, she switched to greens and purples and browns.
i remember papers that looked like i dragged them, through freshly-mowed grass.
then there was one particular week. she returned our papers, we found out what the ink color of the week was, i leafed through my report, i saw all the errors and corrections to make ..
.. and i couldn't find a grade on it. on the last page, after everything, she simply wrote:
"REWRITE THIS."
f-ck, i thought. this must have been really awful.
so in that 24 hours, i wrote and rewrote and wrote some more. i don't know if i slept at all, that night. in retrospect, i don't know why it mattered so much.
all i know is that i struggled to stay awake in class the next day. when it was over, i handed the new version to her. she leafed through it and told me it looked a lot better, that i'd get it back next week.
everyone knew that 4+'s were incredibly rare. what i learned, some months later, is that nobody had ever gotten a "rewrite" before, not anyone in my class or anyone i knew.
a year or two later, i asked her about it.
"the ideas were great, but your presentation .. needed a lot of improvement. it wasn't ready for a grade until it was fixed."
i lost a lot of sleep that year, but i did learn how to write .. perhaps not brilliantly, but well enough.
on the last quiz i gave my analysis students, all but one student botched one particular problem. maybe they didn't have their act together, maybe they ran out of time; the point is,
they still don't know how to use definitions.
they need to learn how to be careful, detecting hypotheses and assumptions.
their training's just begun: they have a lot of maths to learn, a lot of practice to do, and that occasionally warrants a second chance.
so i didn't grade the problem. i told them to look at it again, add it to their next homework. when they have their proofs ready, then i'll grade them.
if i could learn how to write, once upon a time,
then maybe they can learn how to work out a proof.
[1] it used to puzzle me: why she wouldn't use an A-F letter scale? being something of a teacher now, i think i understand.
an A has a standard meaning; so does an F and a C and a B. as for a 2+, it's open to interpretation. that school district was full of well-off families who knew how to complain about teachers and grades. later i met a lot of kids who never got higher than a 2-, but there were very few who failed the class.
2 comments:
what a great story and an excellent lesson. I had a teacher who helped me that way as well, Mr. Thompson.
hi Nic, good to hear from you.
i was wondering whether other people had gone through the same experience or not. it sounds like you valued yours, as well.
on a wholly unrelated note, i cannot help but think of "thompson" as a fictional name. have you ever seen that simpson's episode where the simpsons family goes into the witness protection program? (it's a sideshow bob episode.)
Post a Comment