No school for AAPS high school students yesterday as teachers were scheduled for a Professional Development Day. In the afternoon, I was part of a group of teachers from Pioneer, Huron, Community and Skyline who teach English classes to 11th and 12th graders. We met from 12:30 - 3:30 pm, and our charge was to develop what’s known as a Common Assessment for our classes.

Apparently, our task has been mandated by the state. Something about creating a new source of measurable data. What it means is that we’re supposed to have at least one uniform way to evaluate the progress of our students that can be applied to any kid across the district enrolled in an 11th or 12th grade English class. At first blush, that seems fair enough. We’d all like students who successfully complete our classes to be able to be proficient at a certain modicum of skills. Yet, the question’s more complicated than that.

Here’s the problem - the menu of English classes available to Juniors and Seniors is broad and deep, ranging from offerings based on literary analysis like British Literature and Women’s Literature, to others that are more writing-based like Journalism and Creative Writing. It’s not that there aren’t overlaps between all the courses - sure, at the fundamental level they’re all about helping students to become better readers and writers, stronger and more articulate critical thinkers - but common sense also dictates that a class like Twentieth Century Literature is asking students to do different things, to explore reading and writing in a vastly different way than a class like the one that puts together Community High’s award-winning student newspaper The Communicator.

I believe the wide variety of learning experiences we offer our students is one of the greatest strengths of our district. Students who are seventeen or eighteen years old can choose to take classes that are essay-intensive and based on a traditional canon like AP English, or they can look at multi-media cultural literacy in a class like Film. They can learn about the elements of poetry through a case study of classical poets like Milton and Shakespeare, or by writing their own poems in response to the contemporary work of authors like Patricia Smith, Ishle Yi Park, Sandra Cisneros and Patrick Rosal.

A one-size-fits-all assessment of what students are doing reeks of a top-down attempt to homogenize such learning experiences, to create a kind of teacher-proof template that attempts to certify a numbers-properly-crunched acquisition of knowledge. It’s an over-simplification of what we do, and of what students need us to do.

Look at like this - Football, Bowling, Crew and Figure Skating are all sports. They all require discipline, focus and a certain level of hand-eye coordination. But to attempt to create a single assessment that demonstrates the proficiency of an athlete at all of these endeavors is a ludicrous proposition. It’s quite possible for somebody to be the best line-backer in the world and suck at anything having to do with ice skates. Does that mean he’s not a proficient athlete? So too, a kid might be terrific at developing a first-person narrative voice in short stories featuring blue-skinned aliens and suck at writing cogent compare-and-contrast essays about late nineteenth century Victorian drama. Does that mean she’s not a proficient English student?

Sure, there might be a way to figure out some kind of rubric that connects to all the various elements of different English classes and apply it across the board. But we already have that. It’s called grades. It’s called the professional judgment of educators who are in the classroom every day with their students and can measure their progress on hundreds of different tasks specifically designed to attune students to their subjects.

The energy in the room at yesterday’s meeting was actually exciting. Thirty or so teachers from different backgrounds with different quirks and passions all coming together to talk about what we’re doing in our classes. Some of us were in our early thirties. Others were in our sixties. Some were male. Some were female. Some were short. Some were tall. Some were balding. Some wore glasses. Some of us fell in love with reading and writing through Marvel Comics. Some through Bob Dylan lyrics. Some through Toni Morrison. Some through Charles Dickens. Some through ancient poets from China. Our different teaching styles, what we choose to emphasize in our courses, reflect our passions, our personalities and our strengths. If we all looked the same, and taught toward the same linear point, I suspect our classes would be a whole lot less interesting. In this era, when distraction lingers just a text message away, the last thing we need is for our classes to be less interesting.

I left the meeting feeling like it would’ve been a wonderfully fruitful experience to spend three hours talking to this group of passionate, insightful, articulate people about how they actually teach their subjects. I would have loved to learn about how some of my colleagues talk about metaphor or about poems that travel simultaneously through landscape and psyche. Instead, we dissected the question of what kind of point-scale we should use to meet a state mandate.

We did what we’d been told to do. A good faith effort.

I report that the staff has been professionally developed. ** NOTE - Anthony Zick and I will be reading poetry at the Writers Reading at Sweetwaters monthly gathering tonight at Sweetwaters at 123 W. Washington St. The reading is free and starts @ 7pm. It includes an open-microphone segment for anyone who wants to share his or her work, so come on down just to listen, or so we can hear your voice too.**

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.