Negotiating the Grades: How Ballsy Are Our Students?
Dear Deems and Brena,
First of all, it’s lonely here in the States now that you two have both flown home for summer. So while I am frantically planning my summer teaching, you two are relaxing with your families, darting questions about when you are both going to get married, and eating miraculous food, no doubt! I’m hoping that we can keep posting even with the oceans between us and that perhaps we can get some of your friends in Taiwan and Lebanon to contribute their thoughts!
So this week I’ve had three students email me with questions about their final grades. All three did more poorly than they expected. After I explained to each what their final grade breakdown was and offered to meet with them in person to walk them through their final paper and my comments, two of the students emailed me back ready to negotiate. The third student just lamented her regrets and thanked me for my encouragement. Of the two who were not ready to accept their final grade, one wrote: “I really need an A in this class. Can’t you just bump this up to an A-?” Her final grade was a B+. I simply emailed back that her grade wasn’t negotiable. The second student emailed: “I don’t understand. I did fine on all my other writing. How could I have done so poorly?” She then followed up with some suggestions of what I might have overlooked in grading her final paper. I then emailed again and said I would be more than happy to walk her through her final paper but that the grade itself was final.
The first student really surprised me by asking if I could “bump her grade up” with no reason to do so on my part. This seems like an absolutely insane suggestion! She’s a student that did poorly on her midterm (an annotated bib) and came to talk with me about it. I explained how she hadn’t fulfilled the assignment as the rubric outlined, what she could do for extra credit (an option extended to the whole class) and what she could get for a final grade IF she did well on her final paper. I believe I mentioned that she could still get an A- in the course. I thought, at the time, that this was important to lay out so that she wouldn’t lose faith in herself or lose interest in the course, which she had mentioned was really resonating with her personally and politically. Unfortunately, her final paper didn’t really hit the analytical mark. One key aspect of her final paper that happened with many papers that hit below the A-range was that her feminist analysis didn’t address race and class, two aspects of intersectionality I stressed were key to understanding experiences of women’s health. For all students who didn’t address race and class, I automatically cut the points allotted for their feminist analysis in half (15 out of 30), which I still think is generous given that understanding race and class are KEY KEY KEY to the course material. What are your thoughts on my grading here? I ask because I can redesign the rubric for next quarter….
As for my second student who was really obviously pissed off with her final paper grade, she made the same race and class omission but also failed to use textual evidence as outlined in the rubric. And her connections to the overall course were kind of plot-based (i.e. this woman had breast cancer and this article talks about breast cancer) as opposed to thematic (i.e. this woman’s struggle with breast cancer seems to be exacerbated by her lack of access to proper preventative care, something we learned affects African American women disproportionately in the following article). Therefore, she lost points for textual connections and course connections.
What makes me feel a little awkward about the grade is what she wrote in her self-evaluation, a reflection I have students attach to their final paper for ten extra credit points. I usually give students credit for these reflections, grade their papers, submit their final grades, and then read the evaluations. In this particular student’s evaluation she wrote that she felt the class was too liberal and that she didn’t feel free to express her conservative view point; therefore, her class participation was limited. She also wrote that “while I understand that access to healthcare is an issue for some people, I still feel it is used as a crutch for most people so they can avoid taking responsibility”. Here’s where my awkwardness comes in: I’ve spent so much time discussing how systems (institutional, ideological) come into play in terms of limiting access, how individuals interact with systems, etc. Literally every unit I teach comes back to this key issue in healthcare and how we understand women’s bodies. That a student could write this in her self-evaluation makes me hesitant to even give her a B+ in the course because, realistically, this kind of understanding doesn’t reflect an “above average” intellectual involvement with the course material. But of course, her grade is already submitted and this is why we have rubrics, etc etc because I’m not grading students on their politics. What really sucks is that I am sure this student feels like I graded her down based upon her politics as opposed to her analytical skills (if I graded based on politics, I wonder if she’d pass!). I worry that I’ve closed her off to feminism and social justice entirely….what do you guys think?
Papers and Precise Language: What’s asking too much?
Dear Brena and Deema,
Brena, I feel like the underlying question of your post is something like “what’s asking too much of our students?” I constantly think about this, question whether I am grading or asking for performance in general from my students that is inappropriate. I try to put myself back in that place of being a freshman or sophomore and think about what the difference is between asking for good and precise writing that demonstrates a reasonable familiarity with key concepts (without the flowery readability so many of our students like to employ) and what is asking for graduate level understanding of the depths of these key concepts.
Rubrics can be important here, but even rubrics can have subjective components. And how much, on a class that is really about social justice (in the context of gender, race, class in our cases) can we stress the importance of language choice on these rubrics? In other words, how much does writing “count”? And how can we create rubrics that demonstrate our understanding of language and consciousness being connected?
It seems that our students feel really comfortable with words and phrases that are simply bad (i.e. generic or imprecise) but it comes to a new level when these phrases are insulting (such as “ethnic woman”) and counter the very purpose of the course. How harshly do we grade down for this? And in grading a final paper that our students will never actually receive feedback on, that they are writing really to get done, how productive is it to grade down for imprecision if you think otherwise they’ve demonstrated a reasonable understanding of concepts?
I think my bigger question back to you, Brena and Deems, is how do we grade in such a way where grading is an opener to further conversations, rather than an end-stop? In some ways, I’d rather students leave my class feeling less confident about their understandings of Women’s Health and how it connects to social justice than more. I want them to keep investigating but sometimes (many times) poor grades can close a door to a student’s investigation because they lose confidence. But good grades can make a student feel over-confident, and then you have another closed door to interrogation. So maybe we should just give everyone C’s???
I think I’m becoming long-winded here because grades are due tomorrow…….perhaps its time for a little wine to perk me up.
Thoughts on Students’ Final Paper
Dear deems and Ally,
I have some thoughts on students’ final paper. One of my students wrote in his final paper that he couldn’t “witness” the gender divide in art museums where his group chose to observe. He continued saying that since he couldn’t see the gender divide in terms of artists and audience, it seemed to him that gender issues were not relevant to the space of art museums. He also argued that why then they presumed there should be gender issues in art museums for the first place; he replied that because this was a women’s studies class and they were told that women were oppressed. In fact, I was shocked when I read his paper. First, he jumped to conclusion too quickly. Second, the largest problem is how “to see is to believe” is so prevalent.
I start to think what the problems are imbedded in this concept of “to see is to believe.” I remember deems once told me that she didn’t like to teach the class about domestic violence because students couldn’t get the point. Those women who suffer domestic violence might be blamed for their own “inability” to get out of the violent relationship. Without witnessing domestic violence in their own families or in their friends’ or relatives’ relationship, students seem to be unable to get rid of the obsession of “autonomous” self. Without “seeing” similar things happening around them, they seem not to believe that those things really exist. However, as we all know that visibility doesn’t mean reality, how many times we are fooled by the representation of media. And even if the oppression or suffering of women are visible on media, we may encounter another danger of falling into the pitfall of victimization of women once again. Then, I’m wondering how we could teach our students to get beyond “to see is to believe”? What this demand of “witness” tells us about our society as a whole and about how we conceptualize knowledge and ethnic responsibility? If we don’t see the struggle or suffering, can we avoid the responsibility? My answer is no but I don’t know what pedagogical strategies we could apply to get students understand that.
In addition, I was shocked when another white student used the terms, “ethnic women” and “cultural women,” to describe “immigrant women.” Even though there’s no term like “ethnic women,” her coined term, “ethnic women,” indicate that she totally ignores the fact that white women are also one kind of “ethic women.” It’s my first time to really understand how important language is in terms of pedagogy. Also, I felt a little bit frustrated. It was already the end of the quarter, but she still didn’t quite learn that whiteness was also a social construction. This reminded me of one in-class activity during this quarter. In that activity, I asked each student to name their identities. But I noticed that almost 99% of white students never used “white” to name their identities while 100% of students of color included race when naming their identities. I know this is a long way to get students to know the idea. But I was still struck by the fact!
Return to the problem related to “ethnic women,” I realize not only that the use of language is always linked with the way we think but also that without letting students understand and properly use the correct terms, I feel that I let their incorrect thoughts continue. If we take language seriously because language and consciousness are so interrelated, what is the pedagogical move that we should take in terms of grading students’ paper and their speech in class? How do we really take language as a political site in classroom?
Preventing Burn-Out: The Role of our Advisors
Dear Deems and Brena,
So this week, the final week of classes, has been a tough one for me. Though in terms of teaching, it’s been really productive and I feel like my students are just as excited to learn about Women and HIV as they were to learn, five weeks ago, about home birth. I’m having really great conversations in class and getting great response papers so I know folks are engaging. But back to my original point: it’s been a tough week. And I have to wonder how the role of my advisor plays into it.
Here’s the short version of the story: I’m doing a third class this quarter as part of my Disability Studies minor. The class involves meeting with the ADA coordinator a few times one on one and drawing up a research proposal (about 8-10 pages) that addresses what component of my PhD Dissertation work will involve Disability and why. Because I do work in Women’s Health, this is a really natural fit. For my dissertation, I am hoping to look at women’s experience with mental health and HIV through written narrative. I came up with a proposal that involves running reading focus groups with women who identify as HIV positive or with Bi-Polar disorder. I have two years until I would be conducting this research so I’m really in the early stages. So that’s the background. I sent the proposal to my advisor, who knows I am doing this research credit and additional minor, saying that it would be great to meet and chat just to see if I am on the right track in terms of a do-able project that is theoretically sound.
My advisor has encouraged me to slow down. That it’s not time to think so specifically about my dissertation in year one of my PhD program. I agree that I have a lot more to learn about methodology but isn’t it useful to have a sense of where I’m going, however much that initial proposal might get revised?
Here’s what I’m wondering and why this relates to burn-out: I think it’s really important to have a dissertation goal in mind when working on my course work so that I can work on the appropriate skills for my research methodology. I also think that having an idea about my research helps me to stay engaged with my students as a teacher because, if we are teaching the same course quarter after quarter, semester after semester, it’s easy to get tired. To get frustrated. But if I have an idea of how my work contributes to the field, to the classroom, then I can keep my excitement high and not get as discouraged when it feels like we are over-worked, starving, caffeine-dependent and cut off from our family and friends in other parts of the world. So my question becomes: should an advisor indulge our dissertation planning if, for no other reason, for keeping us encouraged in the program? And what does this encouragement look like? And how can this encouragement contribute to preventing teaching burn-out?
Pedagogies for the Revolution 