The Pains of Being a Receiver

  I mentioned in an earlier post about assessment, that simply reading a student's writing with the expectation of receiving a gift is actually challenging a view that teachers should administer assessment rather than enjoy student writing. It is I,the teacher, who gives you, the student, a grade or an assessment, thus turning your work into something that can be coherently compared to something else. This, after all, is what the term "grade" comes from; it refers to a quality that can be scaled, compared, or categorized into specific functions or levels. Because the teacher gives a grade, the role of the teacher assumes a crucial agency, which students often lack. It's rare to find students completely in charge of their own grading. Even in those special cases, it's usually a teacher who becomes the final arbiter of whether the student's judgment or grading scheme is justified or not.
   What are the pains, then, of being a receiver of gifts? I think this goes back to a cultural notion of receiving a gift as a form of having a debt to someone else, which often seems unwanted. But it also seems to incapacitate the person who considers him or herself to be the "giver" in a teacher-student relationship. If I allow myself to admit that I am privileged to read my students' work (that is, even gifted to do so), then I am reversing the attitude that a student should thank me for giving them a grade and properly judging their work as "good" or not. Instead, I look to the student as providing me with an experience that is fundamentally not reduced to a grade, or a teacher-student transaction. In doing so, I surrender some of my "authority".
    Of course, we do (often inevitably) judge the gifts we receive---for example, we decide that our gift-giver was a bit too "cheap" or hasty in the way they prepared the gift. In that sense, receiving gifts and being thankful for them does not preclude my abilities to assess the quality of the gift itself. But seeing myself as a recipient of a gift from another takes away (to a certain extent) my capacity to judge the gift/giver in the way that I would judge my own purchases. In effect, I am told: this person did something 'gratis', and certainly didn't need to go to this length to do so. Seeing that this gift is not based on a previous debt, it must surely be seen as a gift, or at least as something coming from another person's sincere heart and intention.
   By shifting away from an idea of exchange, something must surely happen to the identity of the teacher as an assessor. This is my ongoing "huatou"--a contemplation for future postings.