I require my students to leave their names off the front of their essays because I do not want to associate the person with the essay when I grade. Instead they just provide me with their social security number. In this way I hope to be unaffected by the characteristics of a student that are extraneous to the writing. If they’ve made many smart comments in class, for example, I don’t want to automatically give them the benefit of the doubt if a written paragraph is unclear. If they’ve missed several classes, I don’t want to feel like I should dock points on an essay as a response.

I realize by writing the above I run the risk of making myself sound like a capricious grader. I’m not. But I’d like to reduce the distractions running through my head as I’m making comments in the margins and considering the quality of the writing. I’ve not had a problem with my grading. I’ve been teaching since 1993, and I can count on one hand the number of times a student has come to me to complain about a grade on a paper. (Hmm. Maybe that makes me sound like an easy grader.) However, I’ve adopted the anonymous grading policy recently, and it seems to work pretty well.

When they don’t get the grade they think they deserve, students often get quite upset, and I can understand why. Writing is a pretty personal act, and getting a negative reaction to your writing can feel like a personal attack. This is the logic behind the exclamation, “But I’m not a C student!” I would argue that there’s no such thing as a C, or B, or A student. This is an essentialist argument, as if grades are a response to some quality inherent in the individual that magically makes itself apparent in the student’s work. But I’m not grading students; I’m grading assignments. The anonymity assures this.

In a subsequent entry I’ll address some of the potential drawbacks of this policy.

First in what I think will be a series of reflective postings on teaching:

It’s all over but the shouting. Or the final exams, anyway. As the semester draws to a close, I’m thinking about teaching and planning for next semester.

In both English 317 and English 350 this semester I had the students play “Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation” developed at the University of Virginia’s Speculative Computing Lab. I used Movable Type as the software and created a simplified version of the game (PDF rules) for my students.

The students seemed to like playing the game, and I think it really opened up some issues with the texts that they might not have otherwise considered. Now I’m faced with the challenge of grading their performance in the games, which is tricky. The classic assignment in an English class is the essay, and there are relatively standard requirements for what goes into a good essay even as the specific goals of that essay might change. Students will ideally be familiar with these requirements by the time they reach a junior-level English class, but this isn’t always the case. (There is always a bit of re-explaining that takes place.)

However, I’ve always wanted to provide students with a variety of assignments that provide them with multiple ways of thinking about the subject of a class. Some times I’ve given them a menu of “Self-Directed Learning Tasks.” If you give students an unconventional assignment, one they’ve never encountered before, you will have to be quite explicit about how to complete it, what the goals of that assignment are, and how their performance will be evaluated.

This semester I came up with a series of different assignments (more on them later) that were meant to provide for them the understanding that literature, literary criticism, and scholarship do not happen in a vacuum but are part of an ongoing conversation among writers and readers, some professional and some not. I think I need to work on how I explain this to my classes. And I need to determine for myself and for my students whether Ivanhoe helps provide them with that understanding. I think the answer is yes, but I will work on articulating why.