Well, just had a nearly complete blog post go poof when in the process of researching and writing it, I realized that my animating thesis was not well illustrated by the example I was attaching it to. No matter what I've tried, it's a square peg into a round hole.
I still think the animating thesis, that we cannot treat students exclusively as little bundles of capital and expect them to thrive is sound, but I was trying to tie this to the recent report on the Gates Foundation teacher evaluation research and it just doesn't quite fit.
Or at least it didn't fit in the way I'd framed the argument and I don't have anymore time today to make it work. I think I have to start over tomorrow.
This experience made me think about how little room we give students to take a swing and miss on a writing assignment in the way I just whiffed. In the end, students are incentivized to bluff their way through a paper even when they know it's flawed because of how they're judged.
It has me wondering if there's a way to put a kind of "ripcord" clause into assignments, where students can pull the cord and parachute out of trouble if what they're trying isn't working. Instead of finishing, they'd write something about the process, what they think went wrong.
As I think about it, I like it. It incentivizes risk and exploration, but gives an out if a student has bitten off more too much during the particular assignment window. Rather than having students cobble something together for credit, why not let them reflect on what went wrong?
Wouldn't they learn more doing something like that rather than trying to bluff something inherently flawed through to the end? I don't think they could take it on every assignment, but why not once or twice during the semester?
For every five completed blog posts I have at least one that failed. Usually they hit the ground early as a notion doesn't give rise to a worthy idea, but today's got over 1200 words before it impacted the ground and burst into flames.
But in this failure I learned a ton more about what I was writing about. Isn't learning stuff the goal of writing? Why should I always require students to give me something "finished" in order to prove they learned something?
