Degrading the Grade

I wrote this essay for an anthology about teaching being prepared by my pal, Jeanine Dell’Olio, at Hope College. My students already know about my approach to grading, of course. Julie thought this would be a good place to keep this essay, with hopes these ideas can continue to stir up trouble.

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Degrading the Grade

Jack Ridl

I have spent my classroom life teaching in the arts, specifically poetry writing. Among the questions I am most asked is “How do you grade a poem? Isn’t it completely subjective? Isn’t it impossible to grade any art?”

Well, of course you can grade a work of art. You can decide to award an A for accomplishing effective use of various artistic elements or a grade based on improvement. You can grade based on a determination of quality. You can determine the criteria. I had a writing teacher whose grading system was A if you wrote as well as Shakespeare, B if  you wrote as well as Hemingway, C for “most of you, likely.” Another teacher offered this system: “C if your work makes me think. B if it makes me feel. A if it makes me laugh.” So, yes, you can grade an artwork.

But how to grade was not the issue for me. Why grade, and what are the consequences of grading, and does the grade help a student develop? These were the questions that would not leave my mind alone when I took a walk. Then one day came the epiphany. It was rather simple as epiphanies go: Grading was preventing my students from being artists, poets.

Grading interfered with the value of constructive critique. The grade was not an assessment, not even a reward or a punishment. It was a consequence. As soon as I would suggest to students that they could do something else with an ending or a line break or change the tone, all they heard was a grade plummeting. Defenses rose. They refused to see any alternative to the way they had composed the work, and stood firmly for the A grade they deserved. The result was stifled growth, inauthentic work, begrudging changes that took little if any effect, a hostile relationship between what should be a coach/mentor and a growing writer.

So I eliminated grading. I eliminated it in order to suggest, respond, criticize. And what happened? The students–ALL of the students–began to welcome suggestions and options and alternatives and even challenges. They were not unlike anyone learning to play the piano or to swim or to build a campfire. They wanted to create an effective work. They had always wanted to, but understandably because of school and its achievement evaluation based on measurement, they had to make their grade not their first priority but their first concern. Eliminating grading of their work enabled them to connect their priority with their concern.

And the reward became, dare I say, spiritual and communal rather than a “seal of approval.” They discovered the real reasons for creating. What became important was not confined to the “product.” Importance and value expanded into the process, not because it led to a product, but because the process itself brought valuable experiences, insights, revelations. The students began offering to one another both their poems and the value embodied in them and stories of what happened in the process, both of which enriched the entire class and created a deepening of community. One time I was challenged in a faculty meeting about what I was doing: “Why will your students do any of the work if it’s not going to be graded? What makes them do the work?”  My response was simply “The right reasons.” That sounds glib. It isn’t.

Something that surprised and liberated the students was that they began to discover real value in everything written, successful or not. We had complex and provocative conversations about the importance of the material. We decided together whether it resulted in an effective poem or not. Any image, moment, insight, any line break, the implications of the impact of the rhythm of lines could lead to conversation and worthwhile realizations. The poem did not need to be successful for us to find remarkable and worthwhile content and artistic attributes, ones well worth discussing. I realized that it was my job not to demand that they write successful poems, but to teach them what it took to write poems. They have the rest of their lives to write successful poems

Emily Dickinson didn’t sit down to write a poem for a grade. David didn’t write the 23rd Psalm and say to himself, “That’ll get me an A.” There were very important reasons for composing poetry. The students deserved to have access to that discovery.

But I was worried. Won’t some students blow this whole thing off? Won’t my reputation go down the tubes? Won’t I become a laughing stock, an “easy grader?” And won’t the students create mostly mediocre work?

That’s when another surprise arrived. Instead of mediocre work, the work improved. Not one student blew off a single assignment. And while many students never became full-fledged poets, more than in the past did. In 15 years since my epiphany, more than 60 students have gone on to the best MFA programs in the country and are publishing. No, there is no data.  But what I do know for sure is that every single one of the students had poetry restored to their lives, and have kept it as an important part of their lives since their graduation.

And as for me? I put away being a tough grader and became a “tough responder.” All that means is that I was no longer hesitant to make suggestions and corrections for fear I might “stifle” a sensitive soul. I no longer had to tell them the lie that they needed to develop a tough hide in order to take criticism. They could maintain their vision and voice and sensitivity. They could welcome critical response because it was in their behalf and their poem’s behalf. Critical response did not lead to a grade which had led them to play it safe and learn little. Critical response led to growth and the intrinsic joy that comes when beginning artists realize what can be done instead of hiding within what they can already do.

Sappism

Sappism. In this literary world abundant with theories, I’ve decided to found a new one for the new year–Sappism. Those who subscribe to its tenets will be referred to as Sappists. Fear of the sappy, the cheesy is a plague upon us all, cutting the tender from its mooring in the authenticity of heart. What’s to fear–The accusation of sentimentality. And yet sentimentality itself has had such a bad rap for so long that most of us can’t remember when it fell into the grip of easy disdain. Actually the accusation of sentimentality is usually applied solely and soulessly to anything smacking of the gentle, the tender, the straightforwardly affirming. And yet the most often used definition of sentimentality is an emotional reaction inappropriate to its stimulus. If that’s the case then why not apply the definition to the full range of emotional reactions inappropriate to their stimuli. Seems to me that there is more sentimentality in the range of rages, cynicisms, hype, baroque use of artistic technique, rampant excitement over trends in entertainment and art, shock, imposed distress, and on and on than in the range of responses to kitties (kittens), loneliness, honest love in the midst of all that mitigates against it, flowers, rain, and the kindness of strangers. And so, Sappism. Sappists. Join this ism. Risk the ridicule. Make it a movement.

Sappily yours,
Jack

About Jack

jack@ridl.com

Jack Ridl’s new collection, Broken Symmetry, was published in 2006 by Wayne State University Press. He is the author of two other full-length collections, and three chapbooks, including Outside the Center Ring from Puddinghouse Publications, a collection of circus poems published in 2006, and Against Elegies, which was selected for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for Book Arts in New York.

Ridl, who has taught at Hope College for 36 years and who with his wife, Julie, founded the college’s Visiting Writers Series, is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, and co-editor, with Peter Schakel, of both 250 Poems and Literature: A Portable Anthology, also from Beford/St. Martin’s. Their Approaching Literature in the 21st Century was published by Bedford/St.Martin’s in 2005.

Ridl has published over 300 poems in more than sixty literary magazines including Poetry East, Harpur Palate, The Georgia Review, FIELD, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, The Denver Quarterly, Chelsea, Free Lunch, The Journal, Runes, Water-Stone and elsewhere.

In 1996, The Carnegie Foundation named Ridl “Michigan Professor of the Year.” He was chosen by the Hope College students for the “HOPE Award” given to “Hope’s Outstanding Professor Educator,” was selected the student body’s “Favorite Professor” in 2003, and has twice been asked by the students to give the college’s commencement address.

In the past 15 years, more than 40 of Ridl’s former students have gone on
to MFA programs and to publishing their work nationally.

Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball where his father was a well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of Pittsburgh, and in the world of the circus inherited from his mother’s family.

Of his poems, Naomi Shihab Nye has written, “Jack Ridl writes with complete generosity and full-hearted wisdom and care. His deeply intelligent, funny, and gracious poems befriend a reader so completely and warmly, we might all have the revelation that our lives are rich poems too. What a gift!”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote: “Against Elegies arises from a sense of curiosity about life in both its plain and puzzling aspects. These poems feel their way forward and are attentive enough to the reader to make us feel included–happy accomplices to his search.”

Richard Jones wrote, “A sweet intelligence and compassionate eye are the hallmark of these wise poems–just the sort of art we need in these dark and unenlightened times.”

And Conrad Hilberry has written “one group of poems is unmatched, I believe, anywhere in American poetry. I mean the sports poems. These bring to the world of midwestern high school basketball the sort of authority, the sure nuance and detail, that the movie Bull Durham brings to minor league baseball. They are so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who knows high school and sports that they may well introduce a new genre.”

Ridl’s speaking calendar and publications list and ordering information are kept up-to-date at www.ridl.com.

Ridl lives along a creek that winds into Lake Michigan with his wife, Julie, two dogs and two cats.