What if our students just don't get the job done?

There was a recent JEA listserv thread about students not finishing a yearbook, and what to do about it. Beyond being angry, I have no handy answer, no cookbook recipe for this issue.

I will offer this: What is the worst that might happen if a yearbook were not published until several months later than scheduled? Would the history somehow be damaged? Would the truths be somehow less true? So please opt for completing the best book possible, rather than simply cutting your losses.

But the discussion brought up so many thoughts, which do not add up to a clear thesis but help explain the lack of an easy answer to the original problem. Here we go:

Yearbook is part of the curriculum (if students are offered a class), but it's also somehow "outside" the curriculum, providing THE history of the year. It is an artifact that is treated as a complete work of art, despite the fact that students were learning as the book was being created. Heaven forbid that spreads from the first deadline do not measure up to spreads from a later deadline!

Many yearbook advisers struggle with what to do about customers (students) who simply fail to pick up their copy of the book. Are we enabling their bad behavior by tracking them down and thrusting a book into their hands? Or should we honor their choice to waste some money (and leave us with a few boxes of rejected books)?

Yearbooks should be produced by students, but the pride, professionalism, and even job security of the adviser can't be separated from that student work.

When a football coach happens to be working with a mediocre group of athletes, the record of the team likely represents that mediocrity. No one would seriously consider having the coaching staff take the field, and thus improving the quality of the team.

On the other hand, a coach who never has a winning season... at some point, there will be a new coach.

Coaches usually have the option to cut certain players who are not up to the task, but many advisers don't have that option or get caught in a numbers game (where the course may be cut if a minimum number of students are not enrolled).

Sometimes students are simply dumped into a class, without much interest or motivation, and then live down to that... and are then marked with an "F"... well, that just seems punitive and maybe a little mean. Who is grading the counselors or administrators or the overall school environment that put those young people in such an untenable position? Imagine students being forced to play football, no matter their size or skill or interest.

But perhaps football is too important to mess with like that.

When we find ourselves surrounded by students to whom failure is not all that daunting... well, our community must have issues that go far beyond our class or our school.

Perhaps my "spinning" arises from the fact that I always thought the students and I were in this wacky thing together, and that makes it difficult to assign blame. We failed many, many times. But we didn't stop playing the game.

I feel sympathy for frustrated educators, feeling defeated at the end of a long year. But there is good news! We can do better next school year and getting better starts now.

Grading - art or science?

Ugh... grading.

You would make me try to write down what I do, wouldn't you?

Anyway, the analogy I begin with is that of the varsity football team. If a kid sticks with the team all year and is a senior, but hardly ever gets in the game, he still gets a varsity letter -- the same varsity letter that the star running back gets.

What the star running back gets beyond the letter is adulation, possible scholarships, etc.

What the not-so-talented or hard working kid gets is the chance to play on the Kickoff Return team (which is where I used to stick kids where they would do the least damage when I coached). But that kid was needed in practice, because we needed people to practice against. And perhaps he provided some comic relief. And perhaps it was enough for that kid just to be part of the team. Who knows?

Some football players are lazy and break training rules, yet still start and still are stars. Some football players work hard all the time, but just aren't very big, or very talented. Same with journalists.

But they all deserve a letter. It's a team, after all, and one of the chapters in my favorite leadership book "Management of the Absurd," is "People we think need changing turn out to be pretty good after all." In other words, looking back at groups we are part of, we find that it took all types to make up the whole, and it would have been a different group, a "lesser group, if we had changed them all into clones of ourselves.

So... pretty much everybody gets an A from me on newspaper or yearbook (sort of like a varsity letter). If they screw up, I occasionally drop them to a B or even lower. Oh my!

Grades are like praise for me: they don't really motivate people (as "Management of the Absurd" reminds us). They simply demonstrate my power. So I begin the semester saying, "Everybody gets an A, unless you mess up the rest of the staff so badly we can't fix it. Now let's talk about being a great newspaper/yearbook."

That is it.

Do I still get ticked at kids who screw around? Miss deadlines? Forget to run spell check? Interview only friends? Of course. But what makes me happy is a great team, and teams never work well when some team members get all the attention and acclaim from the coach.

Others give my "stars" their acclaim, in the form of individual and group awards from Quill and Scroll, or the Colorado High School Press Association, or any number of other organizations.

From me, they get constructive criticism, and an "A" if they even come close to doing what they are supposed to.

When an editor complains to me that some staffer is getting the same grade as she is, even though he is not doing quality work, I say, "Does that diminish your grade? If not, are you looking for justice? You may have to search a long time to find justice in this world. And don't you get to cover the plum assignments? Don't you get to control much of what goes into the paper? Don't others acknowledge your talent? What more do you want? Do you want me to beat the crap out of the lower performing people?"

Then we laugh.

To finish with my football analogy, I much prefer the pass-fail approach to grading (or A-F). If you skip enough practices and mess around enough, you get dismissed from the football team. Same with the newspaper or yearbook staff.

Screw up enough and you don't come back next term.

That's my grading philosophy, and I'm sticking with it.