That's a Nice Paper You've Got There . . .

This year at East Brunswick, I am teaching three sections of the notorious Rutgers Expos class to high school seniors; last summer, we met with one of the guys who runs the program and we designed the high school version of the course, and the deal is that if the students pass then they can get college credit for the class and thus not have to to take it at Rutgers (or they can transfer the credits to wherever they are going) and this has been a compelling intellectual experience for the three of us who created the curriculum and a wild ride for the students taking it: the kids read five long, dense non-fiction piece of writing and write a sequence of five 5 page synthesis essays using these texts in a very logical and academic manner-- it's more of a reading comprehension course than anything else-- and while we're giving them good high school grades for just doing everything correctly, passing their reading quizzes and writing the essays in the right format and creating outlines and taking notes-- they are also being given a Rutgers grade, on the Rutgers rubric . . . and the Rutgers rubric is tough-- the kids agree that a C on the Rutgers rubric is equivalent to a B+ essay in high school and at the bottom end, the Rutgers rubric has a built-in cliff, it falls from C to NP (Not Passing) without stopping along the way in the C- and D zone, which are two of my favorite grades for kids that sort of did the work but didn't really succeed-- I especially like the most sarcastic of all the grades, the D+ . . . there's a certain kind of majestic piece of crap that deserves it, but now those low-but-not-failing-gift grades are off the table and so the majority of students have gotten an NP on the first two essays; the grade is so prevalent that we've nicknamed it Nice Paper, because the essay is decent in appearance; it's typed and cited and five pages and it's got paragraphs and plenty of quotations, but for whatever reason-- poor reading comprehension, lack of independent thought, overuse of summary, incoherent logic, privileging the student opinion over the text, no attempt at synthesis-- it doesn't pass, and so grading them has been absolutely grueling: I've conferenced with every student about each essay-- 120 conferences, the bulk of them about NP essays-- and while I don't think it's quite as difficult as when a doctor has to deliver the bad news to someone who is terminally ill, it's certainly in the ballpark of George Clooney's job in Up in the Air, the film where he flies around the country and lays people off-- like Clooney, I'm trying to keep the conferences positive and candid, especially since the papers are not averaged together for the Rutgers grade, you only have to pass two of them to pass the course, but despite this, there have been plenty of emotional moments and some crying-- these are good students used to succeeding in their efforts, so this is a real wake-up call for them; I've found that it helps if I use my usual tactic and make the conferences more about me than them-- this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you!-- and so I put a chart on the board about how I feel grading each type of essay, so they could see the process through my eyes and empathize with me about how hard my job is and stop thinking about their own failing grade;

total trainwreck NP . . . fun and easy . . . because the errors are so significant and egregious that I can just chastise the student for their lousy effort and we can all move on with our lives;

NP bordering on a C . . . sad and painful  . . . the student was so close and I was looking for a way to pass the essay but couldn't find it;

C . . . hopeful and irate . . . the essay has some promise but completely falls apart in spots;

C+  . . . reflective . . . I'm actually thinking about the argument and the logic;

B and B+ . . . suggestive . . . there have only been two B essays and I haven't read a B+ yet, but with the two B essays I just had a couple of ideas for how to improve the structure and logic and a couple of details they could have added . . . totally pleasant experience;

A  . . . awesome experience . . . there's only been one A essay, and it was in my friend Kevin's class-- four teachers read it and all agreed that it was an A, it was sensational: total comprehension of the really difficult ideas in the text (emergent intelligence, self-organizing systems, evolutionary characteristics, and pattern amplification) and a brilliant application of these ideas to the other text we were working with . . . but I don't expect to see too many of these (and you'd think the other students would have been happy that someone wrote an A essay but they weren't . . . they were annoyed).