Laura Avila has written:
…in class [Tommy] shows up, looks at the board, at me, gives ideas, etc. etc. Still at the end of the year he cannot remember “he wants”even though he was present in body and mind all along. It would take him probably another entire year to remember “he wants”. Should I assess him with “what he can do” with the language and fail him? Or should I assess him with his effort all year to be an active contributing member of our community?
These words repudiate much of what we do in foreign language programs regarding how we grade a large percentage of our students. It just doesn’t make sense to slam Tommy for not doing enough work, not studying at home enough, not doing enough projects, not committing to memory the forms of the written language even though we now know that memorization in foreign language has no value, none. How can Tommy deal? His life is upside down. Tarot fools, we act in our grading practices as if the children of America are not already in enough in pain. I repudiate the teachers in Denver Public Schools who perpetuate the cycle even though they have a new model for instruction, which means that the assessment model we use must change as well [credit: Biggs/Ensor].
Everybody is having “conversations” about race, gender, etc. but the victims of this kind of subtle but widely practiced “grade discrimination” are never mentioned. At least in this PLC, if nowhere else, we are now giving some long overdue attention to the Tommys, so many of them, in our classrooms. This is after largely ignoring the new Interpersonal Skills Rubric for a long time even here in our PLC.
So the Soto Initiative to protect the Tommys, those kids who just can’t, due to poverty and a million other factors , be expected to score high on some dumb ass exam that costs more to create than Tommy will probably ever earn in his entire lifetime, should become a major part of our discussions here this year. We need to not let jGR fade out from these pages again. It is too important.
Darcy and jen and Heidi and others are pioneers with the 100% initiative because they are doing it. Not only do I repudiate Denver Public Schools for their grading discrimination on the Tommys of the district (my guess is that 80% of the kids in DPS are Tommys), I also repudiate the TPRS “guru” whom jen told us about who rejected jGR/ISR (we are just going to have to accept that we will be using ISR in the future as the term for the rubric) on the grounds that it is too “subjective”.