Crock Pot Cooking

I am really terrible at cooking things on the stove. I heat the skillet up for too long and cause a blast of smoke or don’t heat it long enough and the sound of a sizzle is nowhere to be heard. I try to cook an egg and it immediately burns or just sits there in a clear goopy glob. Gross. And flipping that egg? Disaster.

I prefer the crock pot. I can take my time chopping, dicing, slicing, and measuring the ingredients. I can throw them all in together, let them mix, let the juices flow. Flavors infuse. The result is usually something warm and hearty, like chili.  The sum of the ingredients is better than the individual ingredients alone. The slow cooker is totally the way to go – with food especially, and maybe with assessment.
 

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Dr. Cook said it best when she explained the descriptive review process as “slow cooker style” assessment. The individual ingredients of student work get collected and mixed together to create something new. With fresh eyes of fellow chefs and time to think, an assortment of veggies and spices becomes a delicious meal. With fresh eyes and time to think, an assortment of handwriting, word choice, and paragraphing becomes an inspired insight about a particular student, his or her strengths and identity. Rather than get so hung up in whether a student accomplished a given task at an “emerging” or “distinguished” level, descriptive review honors a student’s work with reverence. It allows us teachers to know our students, rather than fix them.

This week, my group and I looked “slow cooker style” at Jacob’s work. I brought in his common task benchmark assessment from the beginning of my time at NPHS. For this assignment, the students were required to read Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech and write a one-and-a-half page thesis-driven response analyzing the central message. The students were supposed to include references from the speech, explore the target audience of the speech, any bias within the text, and their perception of how the speech may have been received by listeners or readers. As my fellow group members noticed, Jacob’s handwriting throughout the piece was a bit sloppy and very inconsistent. It seemed like it had been written by a variety of different people. The group also noticed his colloquial (and inappropriate) language – using words like “colored” and “underclassmen” to describe Truth and other African Americans, his repetition of sentences (whose purpose seemed to be to meet the page length requirement), and the use of “I” throughout. Despite these noticings, the group also realized that his use of the question, “Are you treated fair?” in the introduction shows that he recognizes the inequality that Truth points out in her speech.

As we discussed what we saw, my new insight about Jacob formed: Though he appears to understand big concepts like injustice, he doesn’t seem to have the language to articulate that understanding. He is dutiful to a point (after some prodding, he did complete the assignment), but his shaky handwriting and clunky wordings seems to show distress inside. This makes sense with what I know about the student and his life at home. On my last day, he actually told me, “my family doesn’t know who I am.” This broke my heart, and I was even more disappointed when he was called down to the office just minutes after telling me this since I couldn’t talk to him anymore. I did tell Ms. M so that she can be aware, but I still wish I had some closure on the situation.

Though I am no longer at NPHS and cannot use my insight with Jacob himself, I think his identity crisis of not seeing himself as an academic is something that many students struggle with. As Dr. Cook and Ernest Morrell have said, it’s not about fixing the student – because it is logical that Jacob and other students separate themselves from academics. Rather, as I head to my middle school placement, I want to remember some of Morrell’s ideas about working with students: having something to say is motivation, knowing how to say it is literacy, and feeling good about it is identity. All of this leads to his motto that, as teacher, “I can help you say what you want to say more powerfully.”

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Yum…I like the taste that this “slow cooked” insight. Time for seconds at middle school!