Assessment Time

I have a lot of apprehensions about assessing my students' writing, and I have to admit that I don't know why. Perhaps one of the reasons why I am pushing to do my thesis on gratitude in assessment, is that I have these weird feelings about assessing student work. Part of me thinks of it like having a tiny shark's mouth that tries to bite into a giant peach (a reference, no doubt to James and the Giant Peach). It is a feeling like "where to start?" I am overwhelmed at times by the sense of never being able to get at a student or a learner's thoughts. The writing is only ever a pale reflection and often a final draft, which conceal earlier thoughts and drafts. Could it be that my desire to see evidence of learning in the students gets in the way of simply enjoying the writing the way it's presented to me?

   I think that what I am really wanting to learn is about the way that assessment operates through presence and non-presence: through being in the moment and attempting to stand "outside" the moment to assess "from above", or from the vantage point of an objective observer. To assess means to assume a subject position and (perhaps, though maybe not) to refuse to be taken in by the peripheral qualities that don't land in the rubric of the evaluative process. On the other hand, there is this other function of writing which resists critical evaluation. It's the way that we long to connect to others through their writing, seeing writing as the window to the soul, both the writer's and one's own. Reading and writing as reflection of the soul is also something that Emerson has described in his writings, and it's something I want to continue to explore with my own practice of assessment.