Tricotomania and more

There was a good piece in the Chronicle this week about the SAT. The article is secured to subscribers but is basically taking the College Board to task about the superiority of the new SAT (with essay questions). The author makes some good points, though they are not novel. However in his final paragraph his critique goes deeper.

We live in a society that is accustomed to science, mathematics, and technology giving us neat answers. But in a child’s moving from high school to college there are so many unpredictable factors — changes in motivation, interest, environment — that the attempt to design a test that quantitatively assesses an incoming student’s performance can be little more than a stressful and expensive exercise in self-deception. We can add writing sections, we can tweak the test all we like, but in the end the SAT (and SAT-prep) industry is one with far too much influence over our children’s futures.

I agree that while it might be tempting to devise a test that would predict success and thus ensure that all the students you admit to a certain program are going to graduate with good grades and make your college look good, this is a false hope.  In fact, just yesterday I read a piece in the Globe and Mail (one of Canada’s national newspapers) about a study about to be released by Statistics Canada on university student’s trajectories.

The study, made available to The Globe and Mail before its release, finds that just more than half of college and university students graduate from the program and the school where they begin.

About one-quarter of college students take time off, take more than five years to graduate or change their minds about their school or area of study. Almost one in five college students do not finish.

For those who go to university, the tendency to switch or interrupt their studies is even higher. More than one-third of students are still on campus after five years or graduate in another discipline or at another place than where they started, the research shows. About 10 per cent leave school without graduating.

“These numbers open the door to a whole lot of questions,” said Ross Finnie, a University of Ottawa economist and the lead researcher on the work. “It’s very exciting stuff.”

The new research shows for the first time that many students who leave the first program or school that they choose are not dropping out. Some are “stopping out,” Prof. Finnie said, taking a break before they return to campus. Others are trying another school or a different program and a small percentage - about 2.8 per cent - are moving from university to college. Likewise about 1.4 per cent switch to university from college.

I was one of those students. I did 2 years of a chemistry degree, was deeply unhappy, took a year off (though did one night class for interest), then changed program, initially to a general arts degree, eventually settling on honours in sociology. The cost of tuition has gone up in the 20+ years since I did that though, and even then, not everyone had the financial means to do that kind of thing.  As a university professor, I also saw quite a few students change their minds about their programme in a system that was much less flexible than the Canadian one (I worked in the UK). Some of those suffered depression and/or dropped out or failed out. Some of them just became very cynical about university education. These two experiences have made me question the cultural push to have kids go right on to college from high school. I think there is a lot to be said for waiting — getting a job, doing serious volunteer work, or even just bumming around for a year.

There is also clearly a need for much better guidance for teens as they consider post-secondary education. I have been thinking that I might enjoy doing that kind of work and that there might be a market for it amongst homeschooled students. Maybe I ought to look into it a bit more.

Well, that opens up a can of worms. I still think it might be interesting for a high-school level discussion but I think I should provide some other resources I’ve found on this question. There seems to be a lively discussion that has a few underlying issues in it. Issues that might not be apparent or easy to untangle for a novice.

I’ve now read Hidden in Plain View. There are some serious flaws in the argument, including a misuse of fiction in Chapter 4. As I read it, the authors provide a quite open interpretation beginning with one oral testimony that does not reach very firm conclusions. However, from some of what I’ve discovered since, it appears that others have read it as a more solid history. The authors also failed to consider the motives of the storyteller who first started them on this research, a storyteller who was selling quilts. Their failure to consider this means that there is no evidence provided one way or the other about her reliability.

In the controversy as I’ve been reading it since finishing the book (I’ll post links), there seem to be some other genuine disagreements about historical scholarship though that I am also not happy with. One is a privileging of the written word, especially the published word, and a reference to dates when something was first published as if that is its first existence. I know dating is difficult, but the fact that a song or a quilt pattern is first found in a printed publication on a certain date does not seem to me to suggest that it was not widely known before that date. Hard to prove, admittedly. But the date of publication doesn’t seem to me to be irrefutable evidence that it was not known earlier.

I am also not wholly convinced by anyone who dismisses, almost out of hand, women’s studies, African-American studies, and modern literary criticism. Yes, there are debates within any of these areas and shoddy scholarship just like there is an all kinds of disciplines. But I’m not convinced that these areas of study are any more likely to be shoddy than any other. They do, however, challenge some of the basic premises of other scholarship, including what counts as legitimate evidence. And some of that challenge is justified. After all if only the written word, and preferably the published or official written word, really counts as evidence, how can we ever research the perspective of people who did not have access to those means of telling their stories? That doesn’t mean we accept any old story as reliable evidence, but rather that sometimes we need to explore and develop new methods for historical and cultural research.

So, in line with my original purpose in discussing this topic, I think that this particular aspect of Underground Railroad history offers some particularly interesting possibilities for teaching about the discipline of history in that dual sense of both branch of knowledge and rules and codes of behaviour. Key elements of that set of rules and codes of behaviour are: what counts as evidence? what are the valid methods of interpreting evidence? how do we present our claims? how do we indicate to others the source of our information? what are the acceptable ways of using primary and secondary source materials? what are the recognized arenas of debate?

If you choose to pursue these questions, here are some interesting resources (some of them have links to other resources), many of them skeptical (or even dismissive, almost violently so) of the claims Tobin and Dobard make.

Barbara Brackman Facts and Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts & Slavery C&T Publishing. (I like other things about this book and will write a separate post.)

Barbara Brackman’s website, particularly her page of Hot Topics. She links to a couple of other resources including a self-described “diatribe” by a school librarian Deborah Foley that is worth a read. I disagree with Foley’s argument about the responsibility of authors of historical fiction not to mislead people since I think most of the misleading is being done by people teaching historical fiction inappropriately, something I have talked about before and which Myra Zarnowski provides good ideas for countering. Opens up good discussion topics about the difference between historical fiction and non-fiction, and different kinds of truth.

Brackman also links to Kimberley Wulfert’s article on the subject and to Leigh Fellner’s website containing a detailed refutation of the Tobin and Dobard thesis and related arguments. The last page of that website contains links to lots of primary source documents for the study of the Underground Railroad that might be very useful even if you didn’t want to venture into the quilt issue.

Over time some of the stories about the Railroad have become romantic adventures with elements of myth and legend, and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. (Freedom Roads, pg. ix)

One of those stories is that quilts were an important symbol guiding slaves to freedom. This has been the subject of several fictional accounts of the Railroad, including some picture books. The historical evidence is not very clear though. It makes a great story but is it true?

One of the difficulties is that the kind of evidence historians usually take as “good” evidence is often produced by people in power. We privilege written evidence and particularly official documents. This can mean that the perspectives of subordinated people are excluded from the histories that we tell and teach. And yet, the truth of history is not just the truth of the powerful. How do we uncover the histories of people who did not have access to these privileged forms for preserving their stories? In the case of things like slavery and the Underground Railroad, how do we uncover the histories that were kept secret for very good reasons?

As I was writing the more general post about teaching history, I thought that the story of the use of quilts by slaves and abolitionists on the Underground Railroad might make a good assignment. Asking a keen student interested in the topic to write a research paper on this question might provide a good challenge that would allow you to assess (or demonstrate in a portfolio) the ability to find evidence from a variety of sources, evaluate evidence, and draw appropriate conclusions. Perhaps it would come later in the high school curriculum, once you know that your student has a good grasp of the issues surrounding historical evidence and producing historical arguments and narratives.

The objectives of this project might be:

• demonstrate an ability to evaluate historical evidence
• demonstrate an ability to use evidence from several sources to support an argument
• demonstrate an ability to draw appropriate conclusions from the available evidence
• demonstrate an ability to write a coherent historical essay that addresses the limitations of the evidence and locates the main argument in a wider historical debate

The sources in Freedom Roads and the “people who bought this, also bought” feature on Amazon led me to a couple of promising resources. Hidden in Plain View by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobar draws on oral history along with other evidence to examine the possibility that slaves used an explicit quilt code to teach each other about routes and other aspects of escaping slavery to freedom. They raise issues about the collection of oral history evidence and the importance of trust. The numerous forewords look to provide some perspectives on the ways that different historians might approach the question. From the perspective of a historian who specializes in quilts, the introduction to Facts and Fabrications by Barbara Brackman is also interesting. She introduces some important ideas about the uses of history and the importance of symbolism in quilt designs, instructions for which form the rest of the book. She is very clear about the historical status of these patterns, though. Those she includes largely date from a later historical period.

I have requested both of these from my local library as I’m now curious about this question. If you were assigning this as a high school history project, further research in the library and using bibliographies of good general histories of the Underground Railroad or of slavery to seek further detail from their own sources could also form an important part of the project. In fact, this might be where Steph’s idea of grading contracts could become really useful. Not so much for the grade, but as a way of developing the learning objectives with the student. As the parent, your role is to guide the process to ensure that your student is taking on tasks that are sufficiently challenging for her level and to guard against taking on too much so that the whole experience is frustrating. Deciding on objectives and then agreeing a plan to meet the objectives might involve you going and finding resources to ensure that she can learn how to do the project well. Maybe add an objective:

• Demonstrate an ability to use a range of library research methods and select appropriate resources

I am also in favour of using the skills of the librarian to help with this sort of thing. No matter how often you use a library, getting a refresher course from a librarian on search skills is almost always worthwhile. With an assignment like this one, the librarian could focus on electronic resources, and on more advanced search skills to really help your student develop the kinds of library research skills that she will need in university. Also, there might be interesting material in your library’s special collections or they might have information about the city archives or other local sources that would enable you to develop other history projects focused on using primary documents.

You know my position on grading a class of one, but it seems to me that an essay that was the product of this kind of project would be just the sort of thing that should be in a portfolio for college admission. If you need to make a transcript that has credits and things then this could be part of an American history course, or maybe of a course called something like “Selected topics in History” where your objectives were the general ones about developing historical skills and conceptual understanding assessed by maybe 2 projects like this.

I do sometimes worry that because my teaching experience is at the university level, I am expecting more of younger students than is reasonable. On the other hand, my colleagues and I found that our goals for the first year students were mainly to retrain them to think in this sort of way instead of just parroting back what they had read somewhat uncritically. These were students from good schools with good grades. And we had colleagues in other departments that thought we were nuts to demand the things we did of first year students (including grappling with the idea of the post-modern city) but we got some great work out of those students. So maybe there is an advantage in aiming high but having realistic expectations of what might be achieved.

The Trachtenburg piece on the Chronicle blog this week gives some interesting insight into how transcripts get read. The comments are particularly enlightening.

Sarah left a long comment on that last post and then went off and wrote a really good post of her own about how to translate what we do into “transcript speak”. Very helpful.

(I bet it’s helpful for folks who live in states that mandate so many instructional hours a year, too.)

Shaun’s comment on a minor point in my last post about this topic made me start to question something. She said

On another note, love all the thoughts on grades. We also teach to “mastery” though I define mastery in math as 80% on review tests. I’m not sure that’s working well.

(she actually said this at the end of a comment on another post) Basically, she made me realize that I was making that statement about mastery based on a vague sense of what we were doing and feeling comfortable with that description when others used it. I don’t give Tigger review tests and it made me wonder whether we actually do teach to mastery.

Basically, I am not going to push Tigger to keep working on something if she has had enough. I push her to give things a good try, but we change topics to keep things fresh. And return to them later to go deeper. And we don’t set out an annual plan. We don’t have annual objectives that get reported to anyone. We don’t have to report results. So I’m quite flexible about when and how we cover things. How the heck do I know if we’ve done it to mastery? And what might that mean, particularly for subjects that might be covered to a different level in different years?

I got thinking that maybe I shouldn’t use that phrase. I still don’t think grading a class of one is meaningful. I like the way Meg graded everything on her son’s transcript on a Pass/Fail basis (unless it was done as an outside class that actually gave grades). That suggests to me that for those that are a “Pass”, he learned a sufficient proportion of the material to deserve a credit at that level.

All of that got me thinking about the general structure of transcripts because, of course, there are other issues that bother me. Like the definition of credits based on hours. Seems to me that hours spent on a subject in the homeschool are not at all equivalent to hours spent on a subject in a school school. In particular, the hours in a school are “instructional hours” and don’t include homework time, but do include all kinds of time settling folks down, dealing with administrative issues, etc. And if you aren’t teaching “courses” what criteria do you use to give a credit? Or if you decide to organize the material differently? Or if you are counting things that were covered in activities schooled kids would consider extra-curricular as part of a course?

You can see how the whole transcript thing is just not working for me. But today I had a little light bulb moment. It occurred to me that there has been a sort of revolution in the advice given about how to construct a résumé when job hunting. Instead of just listing what schools you’ve attended and your past employment with a list of duties, the advice nowadays is to list skills and achievements. You still need that basic information about where you might have gained these, but the focus is different.

One place this difference shows up is in what you say about past employment. A list of duties doesn’t tell a prospective employer anything about what you actually did, the skills required to do it, or how well you did it. It tells them what you were supposed to do.  In the new model, you don’t list duties. You list achievements. These probably won’t cover everything you did on a day to day basis in the job. Rather, they will highlight your skills and the contributions you made to the employer. Things like “increased sales by x% in y months” or “developed a new system for z that enabled more efficient ….”. You get the idea.

When you think of a standard transcript, you have a basic description of what was supposed to be covered/learned and a grade. It doesn’t actually tell a college admissions officer (or prospective employer) very much about what you know or can do, nor about how well you know it/can do it. And most of the time the description only focuses on the content and not the skills. Is a particular student a good exam taker? Or can s/he use the knowledge s/he’s gained in the course in other contexts?

Seems to me that this is where the portfolio really wins out. My big problem with a portfolio, particularly now (pre-highschool) is that we aren’t really product-oriented. There is not a lot of stuff that you can put on a table, or in a binder, or whatever. So thinking forward to high school level stuff means thinking not only about record keeping but about what kinds of products it might be useful to have. I’m starting to think that the portfolio might start with something like a skills-based résumé, listing areas of knowledge, academic skills, etc. Then there would be samples of work providing supporting evidence. There might also be evaluative documents (something like the external assessments that university professors need in a tenure or promotion file).

As such, a portfolio is not something you put together at the end to summarize a body of work covered (with a transcript in the front, objectives you were aiming for, etc), but rather a living document that is constructed as you go along to make sure that there is concrete evidence of things that you might need concrete evidence for. So if we’d been working on something, we might stop and say — is there anything we need to do to demonstrate to others that you know this stuff? We might then write an essay or a research paper, or take an appropriate test or exam (maybe an externally recognized one, like a subject SAT or whatever).

This format also offers a framework that integrates formal learning, “extra-curricular” activities, and work experience (paid and voluntary) into one document. Particular skills and knowledge might have been acquired as part of a job, for example, and the evidence in the portfolio might be a sample of work done for an employer and an employer reference.

I’m thinking out loud here, as usual, but I think that the sort of portfolio that might be required for university admission (or an employer) is different from that required by some states as “proof of progress”. College admissions folks are not interested in knowing how much you progressed during high school. They want to know if you are ready for university. Where you started from is irrelevant to them. Achievements are not.

As may be obvious (or maybe not), I’m not very good at doing things for the sake of it, or because of some bureaucratic requirement. This may be why I am self-employed and homeschool. If I’m going to put effort into something, like keeping records and compiling a portfolio, I want it to be meaningful. These thoughts are part of how I’m working out what a meaningful portfolio might look like.

As always comments welcome. This whole train of thought got started by a comment, after all.

In an e-mail correspondence with Steph following her post about high-school transcripts and grading contracts (I can’t seem to link to her post right now), she asked for specific examples of how one might assess skills as well as content. I came up with a few in my reply to her but I thought that perhaps others would be interested. One thing that came to mind was teaching history. As our children get older, how do our expectations of their learning about history change? And what kinds of skills and conceptual knowledge might colleges and universities be looking for in a high-school portfolio?

I have blogged before about Myra Zarnowski’s book Making Sense of History, which sets out a conceptual approach to the teaching of history in elementary school. The concepts and general skills she outlines would be a good foundation for high-school level teaching as well. The three elements of good history teaching that Zarnowski outlines are:

1. Historical Thinking: What kinds of questions do historians ask? How do we recognize the past as both familiar and alien? What kinds of conclusions can we draw from the evidence we have?
2. Historical literature: Using good quality non-fiction literature; for high-school, one might start to include primary source documents as well
3. Hands-on experience: what I might call “doing” history; asking historical questions, searching out appropriate evidence, and presenting it

Zarnowski also sets out 5 historical concepts: Historical context, historical significance, multiple perspectives, historical truth, and historical accounts. All of this would be what I referred to at the end of the review of The Language of Mathematics as teaching the discipline of history in that dual sense of “branch of knowledge” and “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour”.

Making the process of producing history visible to our children becomes increasingly important at the high-school level. Although young children might have a very clear cut sense of “truth” and “lies”, older children should be able to cope with increasingly complex notions of truthfulness and the limitations of our knowledge of certain facts. To return to my comments about epistemology (how we know what we know), it is impossible for us to interpret facts outside of a particular cultural context. Thus in evaluating the evidence and the arguments that are made using that evidence, we need to be aware of the context in which both the evidence and the interpretation were produced, and the context in which we are engaging with the argument. I do not mean to suggest that we cannot work to understand other contexts, but rather that we have to recognize them first before we can even begin to do so, and that our ability to truly understand another context will always be limited. We are thus seeking to approach the truth. That is where the multiple perspectives come in, along with important concepts like “corroboration” — having evidence from more than one source that supports a particular argument. A certain humility is also required though we should not be apologetic about our conclusions.

I am also in favour of being explicit about the nature of scholarly discourse. Scholars in all disciplines are engaged in debate and discussion. When they publish, they are talking to other scholars and to those outside of their field about what they have learned. When they write for children, they are inviting children into their world, introducing them to fascinating stories. What we read is never the final word on a subject but rather a contribution to an ongoing discussion. The discovery of new evidence might radically change the interpretation of what happened at a particular moment in history. More often the change will be subtle, providing a more complex understanding of events. I tend to favour an approach that treats students as novices in whatever discipline they are learning. They are not outside of this debate but need to respect the fact that they are still learning the codes of behaviour that govern it. Sometimes we learn best by participating even if that involves making a few mistakes.

One resource that I have come across which might be useful in teaching about the “doing” of history, with a particular emphasis on the nature of evidence and how it might be interpreted and used to produce historical narratives or arguments, is Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad, by Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan. Using the example of the Underground Railroad, the authors foreground the types of evidence that historians use in constructing accounts about the Underground Railroad. The choice of topic is important for several reasons, not least because it is one that is notoriously difficult to research historically.

The historical events that make up what is called “the Underground Railroad” are an example of such purposely hidden activities. … Over time some of the stories about the Railroad have become romantic adventures with elements of myth and legend, and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. How can we possibly find proof and evidence of activities that were purposely clandestine? Is there any way to recover a secret past? Perhaps. (pg. ix)

The title link I’ve used is to Amazon, where there is a “search inside” feature that lets you see the table of contents and get a better sense of how the book is structured around different types of evidence, from legal documents, to diaries, to songs. Each chapter includes important details about the history but foregrounds the evidence, raising questions about its reliability while also demonstrating how historians use multiple sources of evidence to decide these questions and construct historical narratives.

For example, when discussing the use of anecdotes and oral histories collected after the fact the authors say:

Even though anecdotes like these cannot automatically be taken for fact, they become much more significant as evidence when the details are repeated in the same way by independent sources.

And on pages 115-118, there is a long account of how an archaeologist went from a hunch, “It seemed like a good idea to go looking for immigrant housing under schoolyards in the inner city.”, to a rigourous investigation of maps, public records, legal documents, and tombstones, etc to unearthing a detailed history of one particular fugitive couple.

Copies of some historical documents are included so students would get a good sense of what they look like. Source notes for each chapter are at the back along with a list of additional resources. Yet the writing is geared to middle school students and thus makes a comfortable introduction to a topic not much discussed in books for children — how we do historical research.

Using this book in combination with other non-fiction books about the Underground Railroad would enable you to critically engage with the other books with your child, making visible the production of those narratives in the context of a historical debate. Zarnowski talks a bit about doing this sort of thing with historical fiction, using historical non-fiction to draw out different notions of historical truth — literal truth, artistic truth, and historical trueness. (see page 136 of Making Sense of History for details). A logical complement to this sort of critical thinking about historical fiction is to delve further into the truth of historical non-fiction. Sometimes we just don’t know certain parts of the story and we use a sense of historical trueness (with important indicators that we know that this cannot be fully verified with the evidence we have) to fill out the argument. Sometimes it is necessary to use “maybe” in an historical account but it is still important to know that this is your best possible guess based on the evidence available and to explain why you think it happened this way.

Questions for discussion (or writing assignments) based on this sort of wider study might include:

• What is the main argument of [name of specific book]?
• What evidence is used to support that argument?
• Could you interpret any of this evidence differently? Why has the author chosen this particular interpretation?
• Are you aware of other evidence that would either support the argument or raise doubts about the argument or interpretation? What is that evidence?

Sometimes this kind of questioning leads students into a rather negative position about all evidence. They begin to see bias everywhere and come close to dismissing the whole project of history as impossible. While this is probably a necessary first step, the objective should be to move students beyond this to a more complex understanding of history and its production. Critical does not mean negative. It does mean that you don’t just accept things at face value because some apparently important person said so. The fact that someone with considerable background in the discipline, who has been published by a reputable press, has said something suggests that it is probably right. But history, like most disciplines, is about debate and discussion as a means of developing better interpretations of the evidence and a better understanding of the truth. While our students are novices in the discipline, we can give them opportunities to practice engaging in the debate, respectfully.

It is also important to explain that it is perfectly okay for your historical research to raise more questions. In fact, historians expect this to be the case. So if you have a piece of your story that is only a “maybe”, or there is something about a historical account that is not convincing you, the important thing is to formulate good questions that will lead to evidence that might either confirm your best guess or help you work out what really happened. So sometimes you might want to add the following question to your list of discussion questions:

• What evidence would you need to be more convinced? Where might you find it?

For example, in Freedom Roads, the authors talk about the fact that the enactment of ever stricter laws regarding fugitive slaves indicates that there must have been a lot of slaves escaping.

We learn some basic facts from the existence of this law [the Fugitive Slave Act, 1793]. Because many of the Northern states were in the process of abolishing slavery by 1793, enslaved people had more places to run to. Indirectly from the law, we might conclude that so many more people were escaping and running away in the years after the end of the American Revolution that slave owners pressed for a law to strengthen the article in the Constitution that referred to runaway slaves.

I am convinced by their argument. No one would enact a law unless there was a perceived need for it. But I am somewhat surprised that they make no mention of how we might investigate this interpretation further. Our understanding of the situation would be enhanced by information that must be contained in debates in congress, newspaper opinion pieces, etc. in the period prior to the law’s enactment.

To return to the more general issue of assessing high-school level work, I think that you would want to provide evidence of learning that goes beyond knowledge of a particular historical period or the history of a particular place, though that is important. As your child progresses through high-school you might want to see improvement in the following historical skills:

• An ability to identify the main argument of a historical text and the evidence used to support that argument.
• An ability to recognize different kinds of historical evidence.
• An ability to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of historical evidence.
• An understanding of the notion of corroboration: can identify the use of corroborating evidence in a historical text; can use evidence from another source to strengthen a historical argument; can use evidence from another source to raise questions about a historical argument

By the end of high school you might want to see essays or research papers that demonstrate a grasp of the uncertainty of much historical knowledge and are able to clearly express the degree of confidence their is in particular aspects of a historical account and raise questions for further study in their conclusions.

I hope that some of you find this useful. I would love to hear comments and examples of things others have done, particularly those whose children are older. I am also interested in knowing about other books suitable for middle-school and high-school students that make these questions of evidence and the production of historical accounts explicit. The Underground Railroad is an important topic in both American and Canadian history, but it is always good to have resources for a range of topics. We never know what is going to really spark the interest of our children and being able to work with that spark makes the whole process so much easier.

I’m pretty sure that the Careers articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education are open to everyone. If not, please let me know in the comments. Today’s article is directly relevant to some of the discussion about how the admissions process looks. I thought it might be helpful to those of you you have never been on the other side of it.

Yet here I am, with two colleagues, about to speak to a few hundred high-school juniors and their parents: probably skeptical, jaded, and exhausted by their grand tour of liberal-arts colleges all over the Upper Midwest. Several important administrators are looking on, armed with statistics and quotations from the updated missional literature. I have just been introduced, and I am about to stand up.

What should I say? It’s always absurd to tell someone, “Just be yourself.” Which self should I be? Should I be dynamic and entertaining, or should I try to be a serious professor with big, important ideas? Should I talk about my teaching methods — my pedagogy — or should I just give them a representative episode from one of my classes? Should I be assertive about my beliefs, or should I do my best to be charming and inoffensive?

Who is my real audience, anyway: the parents, the students, or the administrators? Am I here to win converts? Am I here to scare the wrong sorts of students away? Am I auditioning for something? Will my head explode like that guy in Scanners?

So despite the fact that I agree with Ron that the best way forward is portfolios and I should stop worrying and just get on with it, I spent some time futzing around on the internet yesterday looking up high school stuff.

I started with the Ontario Ministry of Education website just to find out whether the high school curriculum guidelines are as weird as the elementary school ones. They aren’t. But those kind of documents still freak me out. I can see how I could have a list of the objectives for the various courses, though, and just tick stuff off as we accomplish it (in a different order).

Though I know it is common, I’m still not clear why you would hit velocity and acceleration 3 times in high school — grade 9 science, grade 11 physics, grade 12 calculus. I guess I can’t figure out how you hit it differently each time. And if you’ve done it a couple of times without the need for calculus, no wonder it is hard to convince students of the importance of the calculus for science…

But then I decided to see what was available out there that specifically related to the situation where I am. I love my American homeschooling buddies, but I don’t live in the US. And Canada is a different country even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. Well, I’m in luck because there is a woman who maintains a whole website and blog about getting into college from alternative routes (including homeschooling). * And just to boost my confidence that I’m not the only one thinking what I was thinking the other day about grades and transcripts she has a great post about homeschooling “diplomas”.

The family unit does have the power to confer some honor or privilege upon a child who has, in the family’s mind, successfully completed high school.

But, the family unit does not have the power to confer upon said child an award that others outside the family are forced to acknowledge.

It is misleading, I believe, to represent yourself as having earned a “high school diploma” because that phrase carries with it the understanding that a government-approved organization assessed and granted diploma status. In other words, if it came off your own printer, how “official” can it really be?

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the point is that a diploma is, fundamentally, a government approved document. And also that you don’t need one to get into college. Many universities will take other evidence of being prepared, including parent prepared transcripts, a portfolio of work, and results of standardized tests.

I also discovered, that in Ontario it is probably easier for homeschooled kids to get into university than into community college. This is because Ontario universities now have policies (or are developing policies) for admitting homeschooled kids as non-traditional entrants. They have even had workshops at their collective gatherings, apparently. Community colleges, on the other hand, haven’t got there yet. I noticed, for example, when leafing through the course offerings at our local college in the library a week or so ago that they require a high school diploma though there is a statement that those who don’t meet the requirements as laid out can approach someone for special consideration.

I think I have done enough worrying for now. I’m going to just relax and do what we are going to do at the level that seems appropriate (which, yes, means calculus alongside velocity and accelleration the first time through unless a good reason not to do that crops up in the actual doing of it). I need to deal with my own inability to keep good records so that when we need to demonstrate to someone that she knows these things, I can do so. But otherwise, we are back to our generally unschooling approach.

If any of you are similarly challenged in the record keeping department and have found ways to keep track of things that work (more or less), do shout out in the comments or post and let me know about it. (No, Angela that is not you. You are wonderful in many ways but I suspect you can’t even begin to understand the problem, being a natural record keeper and planner.) I’ve started jotting things in a day-planner and I think that might be a good basis. Other ideas more than welcome.

* The site is specifically about getting into Ontario universities. She does have some links to information on other provinces. But even if you live in another part of Canada, Ontario has the lion’s share of all the universities in the country, so the info is likely useful for all Canadians. (I found out about a year ago that something like one third of all graduate degrees granted in Canada are granted by the University of Toronto, for example.)

Some of the blogs I read (and folks who read here) have been talking about high-school, and transcripts, and grades. Steph had an interesting post about grading contracts and asked for feedback which got me articulating some thoughts. And I thought I might continue here. For those who don’t know, I was a sociology professor in a past life and have done more than a bit of grading. Also, because I did that in the UK, and there have been increasing accountability measures around teaching in universities there, I was amongst the first generation to have some training in teaching related stuff when I started out. Part of that was about assessment.

My past life is also relevant to this conversation since much of it seems to be related to “college prep” (a particularly American term, but one which the rest of us can understand). The reason people are concerned about grades and transcripts in high school is largely to do with the college admissions process and is thus somewhat independent of state/provincial requirements for documentation/reporting. Those of us who don’t have to tell the government or its representatives anything about what we do, start to worry about this sort of thing when our kids hit highschool age (or high school level work, in my case) because we think someone else might want to see some documentation of what our kids know. So the fact that I have been on the other end of a university admissions process (albeit in the UK) and still read things like the Chronicle of Higher Education means that I might have something to add to this debate beyond my own experience as another homeschooling parent.

The first thing I want to say about this whole thing is that giving grades to a class of one is incomprehensible to me. It isn’t just the class of one part. As others have said, we do things to mastery so all the grades would be As. But the class of one thing is important, too. Grades are fundamentally about discriminating between students. “Discriminating” in the good sense: “be, set up, or act on the basis of, a difference between or between, distinguish from another; observe distinctions caqrefully, have good judgement;” (OED Concise) When teachers write references they are often required to state where a student placed in the class, as well as comment on any particular strengths (and maybe weaknesses).

When we learn about assessment, we are taught that a good assessment tool will enable us to sort the students. Teachers aim for a good spread of marks. If all the marks clump (anywhere: top, middle, bottom), there will be questions asked. There may be good reasons, but the assumption will be that the group will follow a normal curve (that’s a statistical term; if you aren’t familiar with it, you might want to look it up). A small sample size (as most classes are) might not, but stray too far and folks might wonder if it is the students or the method of assessment.

The trouble is that most of the homeschooling folks I know (online and IRL) are more concerned with ensuring that their kids really know things. that might mean that we take longer to cover topics. Or that we facilitate learning that will stick. That is where the “we go for mastery” comments come from. We don’t do x hours on this topic, test, give a mark, and move on. We also don’t decide how much of a topic to cover based on grade level. Sometimes our kids are really interested so we go a lot deeper than might be the usual case in schools teaching the same topic to kids of the same level.

To a certain extent this problem exists in schools, too. That’s why the UK has national exams with national exam boards (although there are several) so that kids from different schools are getting grades on the exact same exam. It is also why SAT scores are often (though not always) used in US colleges and universities for admissions. They give some standardized measures to enable admissions officers to compare kids from different schools who might have the same grades on their transcript. To be frank, I have no idea how Canadian universities deal with the variability between schools but there must be some sort of system, even if it is informal and impressionistic.

It is also widely known, at least by the folks in universities that have to teach the kids that are admitted, that the fact that students have covered a topic and even got a particular grade, doesn’t necessarily mean that we can assume that they know certain things. The variability of what they can know to get that grade (even on national exams) is considerable. And we all know that sometimes they learn things for the exam that then mysteriously disappear from their heads as if they were never ever seen. This means that colleges frequently review certain key material. Professors may grumble about having to do so, but they do it anyway.

Even this much of the picture makes me really suspicious of the whole idea of grading one student (and even those of us with several kids usually only have one student at a particular level at any given time). We are not doing what schools do. We don’t have a limited number of hours to cover the material. And we don’t have a group of students to compare and rank. We have no way of getting a good intuitive sense of what can be expected of “normal” kids of this age and level to adjust so we can adjust our expectations, neither marking “too hard” or “too easy”.

Our instinct (and it is a good one) is to go for giving grades that reflect what our students know and can do. This is always a fundamental part of assessment. And this is where I think we can do our best job of communicating to whoever needs to know, what we have covered, in what depth, etc. The problem is, to remain with the cynical tone of this whole post, is that this assumes that is what admissions officers are looking for. In reality, I’m not so sure it is the case. Just today, I was reading a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (actually in their blogs) about admissions that mentioned the difficulty admissions officers face figuring out “what number of applicants should be accepted in order to yield the desirable class in size and makeup.” Later in the article, the issues are made more explicit when the author (a former university president) states that in the current climate, where students are applying to more schools, “colleges are being more cautious and accepting fewer students and putting more on the wait list. That way they can carefully craft the ultimate shape and size of the entering class by taking students off the wait list according to the number of beds available in the dorms or how the male/female ratio shapes up, as well as looking at the diversity of geography, ethnicity, or expected major or academic concentration.”

What that means in practice, is that admissions officers aren’t just looking to admit the best students. They are looking to “craft” a class, particularly at elite schools and liberal arts colleges. That doesn’t just mean taking some students from non-traditional backgrounds. It also means taking the sons of influential alumnae even when their grades don’t look that great (how do you think GWB got into Yale?).

Now that kind of “crafting” of a class probably works to the advantage of homeschooled kids. They have something to bring to the “mix”. Something that many other homeschoolers have detailed — independent learning skills, motivation, genuine desire to learn, etc. And just plain old “diversity”. Sure, you have to meet some minimum standards of academic ability, and different colleges have different minimum standards, but the admissions question is a lot more complex. Why do you think so many kids are running themselves ragged doing voluntary work, participating in extra-curricular activities, and “crafting” a good personal statement or entrance essay?

What does this mean about transcripts and grades for university-bound homeschooled kids? No idea. I think it probably means that the grades are going to be taken with a grain of salt. More information about what you were grading, using what criteria will always help. Hours of instruction might provide some sense of comparability but that is largely meaningless as well — we can do a lot more in 10 hours than a school can. I suspect that any university that really insists on transcripts as the primary means of selecting entrants is going to be a problem, though SAT scores will help with them. If they are willing to look at other evidence — particularly essays, breadth of non-school activities, etc, then homeschooled kids should be able to put together a good case. I’d love to hear more details of Meg’s experience with her son. Her comment on Steph’s post was intriguing — she didn’t give grades and he got accepted at some good places.

I’m going to stop there for today. That’s all the cynical part. Why I think grades are basically meaningless for us. I do have some ideas about assessment though and how we might use assessment to help prepare our kids for university. I can talk about what I did when I planned a university course and what I was trying to assess. And I can try to work out how we could do that at the pre-university level. I did a little bit of that in an e-mail to Steph following up on my comment on her post. And she found it helpful. So I will try to talk about it here, too.

And yes, I realize that Tigger is not even 11 yet. But since our plan to use physics to do math in the fall seems to mean following a big chunk of the grade 11 physics curriculum (possibly with some calculus thrown in), I am starting to think that I should document what she is doing. Which reminds me that there is another cynical post about grades that I could write, too.