In talking about whether jGR is really something that we can connect to grading (it is), Chris Stoltz wrote:
…is why I think behaviour(s) should not be graded unless they directly reflect learning outcomes….
And I agree with the exception of in languages. In fact, behaviors don’t just directly reflect learning outcomes in languages, they ARE in large part the learning outcomes themselves.
It’s differentiation in the purest sense. We grade each kid not on how fast they acquire and can present the language (was it Einstein who didn’t say a word until he was six?) but on how they interact with us, on who they are as people. Which is what language ultimately reveals. Math doesn’t reveal who we are as people, but language education does. THAT is what language IS.
What we do is SO DIFFERENT from economics and science and math. It is SO MUCH MORE A PART OF BEING HUMAN, as we glance off our students’ hearts each day and reveal part of our star selves, looking for their star selves, always trying to use language to move ever closer, closer to who we really are, to share being human with others, as we were meant to but somehow forget lately.
Or we could treat language education in the way it’s been done for so long, by making grading and instruction robot-like. I don’t want to do that. I want to live in my heart in my job. I want to laugh and enjoy my students’ endearing if clumsy attempts to become real people in that most trying and difficult time of life called growing up and in those especially insane teen years, where it’s all upside down.
I want to help my students grow up, by using language to glance off their star selves. We could do the robot grading thing, but some of us here don’t want to, as we look to the new era of living in our hearts that is coming so fast, like a freight train now, to us on this particular planet, since we are pure and we come from the stars (a line spoken by the snake in Le Petit Prince).
I want to work in the human way with my kids, and in order to do that I must grade them in the human way. Plus, Krashen says robots don’t converse. That’s enough for me, right there.