Not All Grades Are Created Equal.

When I started off the Lauer and Asher piece, I have to say that I was quite overwhelmed. The various grids and drawings were almost white noise and, as I read on, I was hoping to find some clarity. But, like with most of my leanings into the various readings, I'm usually left with more questions. Here, some of the questions I had in regards to predictability were a little frightening, perhaps because they seemed so obvious to me. For starters, I thought it was obvious that they would take something like a GPA or an SAT score to determine some type of relationship or average to expect from students, even their previous grades in composition classes. However, it was when I took a moment to think about this, by using these methods of measurement, they aren't only measuring the students, their measuring the teachers as well.

What seemed to be lost in these various matrix is that two teachers don't necessarily teach the same way, nor do any two students learn the same way. Are the students who have an A for English teacher and a C from another completely thrown out. Are the class syllabus's looked through to make sure that their are an equal number of writing assignments given to each and that one wasn't dominated by one thing over another. It just seemed to be a gaping hole, and while using something like the SAT's (which is standardized) may not see totally fair, here it actually might be. Otherwise, I can see too many other variables where the grade would be impacted.

On a whole, the creation of the matrix and the charts honestly seemed less confusing than a lot of the terminology that was thrown around. I feel that the only way to really understand how one of these matrixes work would be to actually use them.

When it came to the Brodkey article, I have to admit, when it opened up with Foucault, I was a little nervous. (Let's just say I had a bad experience.) In this instance though, I followed the concepts of subject and thought that it was interesting when she talked about students taking the role of the teacher in group assignments, but like many of my counterparts, she does seem very critical of pretty much everything. The one thing I did find interesting about the study was the actual way that she did the study, through the exchange of letters. I felt like it was something that I hadn't really seen before in terms of an academic study, and I though that as a reading it was an interesting diversion from the heavy statistics that plague the Lauer and Asher book.