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I struggle a lot with starting writing assignments, and at some point in my education, my thought process changed from first draft to first and final. I will definitely be reading this book, because I am always having to remind myself that the first draft is going to be 🤬and that is why it is a first draft. Allowing time in class for students to make drafts and work with others to revise not only helps students view their work from a different perspective, but also allow them to be more confident in their writing.

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I like this approach to writing, I think students would be very receptive to it too. It makes writing seem a lot less scary and less of a "big deal." It makes me think of breaking writing down into smaller parts, just taking things as they come in your writing, and celebrating all the parts of writing that you do. There's a lot of pressure to ALWAYS be perfect, but that's completely unrealistic and perfect is all subjective anyway.

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I really like the idea of the 🤬rough draft! I think that the biggest part of this idea is *letting students create a draft* before submitting a writing assignment. I wish that all classes allowed for 🤬rough drafts that were ungraded but could get feedback on. I think that this would facilitate the writing process really well and make students less anxious about big writing assignments.

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Bird by bird is such a good piece of advice. Assignments can be so overwhelming- so taking it bird by bird or bit by bit is a really useful tool rather than doing it all at once or doing nothing at all. Middle/high school students can also be reassured from this advice because breaking a task into smaller parts can help students understand different tools and purposes that go into writing. -ER

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I liked the ideas of multiple drafts, as well as completing bigger writing tasks by taking it and breaking it into smaller chunks.

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I read this essay in higshchool and it has stuck with me ever since. I think it's really important to always have your shitty first draft, and to constantly refer back to it during your writing process. This is a process for everybody, and is beneficial in breaking down parts of writing and critically analyzing it.

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The 🤬first draft is difficult for me, because in my head everything sounds so perfect, but I can't make my words fit my feelings. I think if I were able to put my most basic ideas and simple points on the page, it might help me figure out what I'm trying to say in the big picture.

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I like the idea of starting small, and focusing on just one aspect to start off. With worldbuilding in particular, if you try to make the entire world a story is set in, that can become very daunting and intimidating. But if you focus on one small aspect, like one town, what is in the town, why is that there, what caused that? And it helps build outwards as you see fit.

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One of my favorite parts was embracing your 🤬first draft second because I feel like we have a tendency to just forget so much about how much work goes into it. Positive teacher feedback following drafts without grades/judgment would be good to boost this in the classroom.

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I love the idea of teaching students to write a 🤬first draft (idk what I'd call it yet) and have them go through the process of picking out piecing they want to use and build on. Also promoting peer dialogue during the writing process instead of shutting it down. It helps me a lot to talk things out, and I didn't get much of that in high school! Not really til college (and even then, only in a few classes).

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I really enjoy the idea of using random experts, everyone has their own set of random 'fun facts', various things that interest them and that they enjoy and learning about these different things from different people helps broaden horizons and diversifies your writing and can result in new ideas and interpretations.

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I wish my teachers had modeled using your own voice in writing more often. Not only would it have taught us how to just do that, but I think it also would have encouraged us to think outside the box/be more creative/have fun with the writing. It would have made the experience of writing much more rewarding in general.

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Scott's book review was very interesting. It reminded me of multilingual learners and how students are forced to assimilate to Standard American English in order to be "succesful" in the classroom. Teachers should be focusing more on student voice than correct grammar and pronunciation. Constantly nagging students about redundant grammar and inhibit their creative writing style.

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I think that it is important to let students use their voice in writing. I used to like writing conversationally when I was just starting out with serious writing in middle school, but I was discouraged by my teachers because this was considered too "informal." I was very passionate about my writing, but the tone was considered too "informal" and my passion dwindled. I wish that I would have been allowed to continue writing the way I did in middle school.

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Creating a formula for academic language truly robs students of their voices and ultimately their creativity. Academic papers suddenly lose any and all flair, and creative writing is wounded as people don't know how to use their own voice anymore without feeling like they are betraying themselves.

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Teaching writing is always tricky and difficult. As Truman Capote said, "I don't think you can teach creative writing," but we can teach confidence and courage in sharing their writing with the world.

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Not underestimating students writing ability is really important, based off of what Professor Lindo said with the writing example. Giving students the opportunity to fulfill a good challenge (in a good place, not too easy, not too hard) and allowing them to use their own voice is key in encouraging writing. -ER

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I think that I still get so caught up on sounding "academic" and "professional," more than sounding like myself. I want to work on this so I can authentically model the writing process for students, using my voice. I want to show them to use their voices, and not that we all have to subscribe to some "academic voice." I think it will also be important to explicitly discuss this personal voice and how it can impact writing. I think it can impact meaning, and convey and affirm identity. All too often I think super rigid expectations of "academic language" shut kids down.

Also--- high expectations are so important. If you don't think your students can, they won't.

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I think the idea of giving students the freedom to write as they please is a really cool idea. It feels like this kind of approach could really bolster motivation and engagement and that would help students improve their abilities. I think emphasis of natural writing is great too because it simplifies things. How are we supposed to teach students how to write essays AND write in "informal manners" at the same time? Natural writing would both help students understand their own writing and feel pride in what they write :)

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I am a student that benefits from structure and examples, and with this, I think that I will be a better teacher by working alongside students while they complete assignments. I think this is also beneficial to myself because I want to make sure I can teach the material in a way that makes sense for most students and the ones that need additional help can use resources that I can provide.

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Allowing students to use their own voice is ultimately what is going to make them the best writers that they can be. So many of the ways in which we communicate are somewhat conversational and professional language is associated with doing whatever we can to get an 'A' and move on. We need to allow students to have opportunities to express themselves conversationally as was said in the book.

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I've never really thought about the way I change the narrative voice of my writing depends not only on what purpose it's fulfilling, academic or creative but also based on the content itself & how interested I am in the content. Looking back on it I can definitely tell a difference, I was switching my narrative voice without realizing it. Knowing that this is something done both consciously and unconsciously by writers is something I need to take into account when structuring assignments and the expectations I'm giving to students

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Just because a class is easy does not mean that it isn't beneficial, and just because a class is challenging does not mean that it is. Here at U of Iowa, I have taken some very easy classes (with regards to grading) where I learned a great deal. I have also taken some difficult classes that challenged me and caused me to learn a great deal.

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I feel unsure about what I think about memorization. Sometimes it might be learning and sometimes it might not be, which isn't a definitive answer - I never seem to have definitive answers. I remember my Latin classes in high school and I think memorization was a large part of learning the language, but I don't think it's been actually helpful in many other contexts. But learning a language is certainly learning and a hugely important thing to learn at that!
I also feel a little silly because I don't remember ever cheating on anything... I probably have and just can't remember tbh 😂

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I would love to focus and assess my students ability to critically apply concepts & deeper level thinking rather than rote memorization. However, I do think that memorization is necessary for a lot of learning processes in some form.

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Rote memorization is useful, but only in the context that the information you learned is applicable to the real world, or your specific career field. Otherwise, rote memorization can be redunant to learning because you are just learning something to pass the test, and then immediatly forget what you learned after taking the exam.

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I think the craziest thing about memorization is that if you're cram-studying to get that good grade you're going to forget everything after the exam and be done with it. But the things we really understand tend to stick with us even when we aren't trying to memorize it. So it blows my mind that the emphasis is on memorizing and getting good grades rather than understanding when understanding is and should always be the main goal.

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I never took an AP class in my life, but I feel like I probably dodged a bullet, but regarding memorization, I was in drama and theatre and that called for a lot of memorization. Obviously, rehearsal and constant practice regarding the lines that I had memorized helped me and not many students have that support behind them. Sometimes, life and jobs require one to know certain things that can usually be learned by rote memorization. Its not the most fun or most dramatic way to learn something, but sometimes life and education isn't about what's fun/dramatic.

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It's 2023, you will probably never be without some type of resource, AP classes are a waste of money and stress, and memorization is just a step to learning information. In a society that is so dependent on tests and memorizing information, it makes me wonder what is being expected to learn and retain. If we are supposed to depend on and answer these tests that have right and wrong answers, how are we supposed to help our students become independent thinkers when we haven't become them ourselves through years of just memorizing information and not comprehending it.

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In high school, we had a wide variety of AP classes that often got cancelled due to lack of students who did not want to enroll in them. When there was an AP class that took off, the class was usually just a few upperclassmen who were really deep into the books or looking for a challenge. However, when it came to the AP exams, I never took them and neither did a majority of the class. This was in part due to the fact many of us took the class for the challenge rather than the credit aside from a couple of us. This was due to the criteria for graduation being very sub-standard in the district and the classes all throughout high school were rather easy to pass for those more fortunate to have been fully invested in school. Due to the large amount of dropouts and failing students in the district the bar was set very low and even honors classes got much too easy for others including me.

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-I do believe that memorization is important, but to an extent. My students will have to know what a verb is, a simile, etc. in order to be able to be a successful writer. It is important that they have the basic sentence structure down in order to be a successful writer. Memorization is important in an essence in order to be a successful writer. It is important to know how to write, and you must know the steps in order to do so.

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I have learned so many things that I have forgotten so quickly. Sure, some I've forgotten because I wasn't interested in the subject, but memorizing historical dates and not connecting the dots between them has been an example of instruction that caused me to immediately forget those dates. Memorization does have its place, but recognizing the purpose of memorization and ways to apply this memorization to make it stick is really important. -ER

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Connection to future teaching:
I feel like learning vocab (including memorization) is important for reading comprehension. However, I plan to structure assessments over this material by having students put the words in context (creating a visual representation, using in writing, etc.). I also want to have them find and define their own words while reading. This puts agency in their hands to decide what they feel is relevant, helpful, and important.

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memorization & regurgitation often led to feeling disinclined to fully process and understand the material and make relevant (for me) connections between different parts of my learning, whereas when I didn't have to remember information for a test but just for my own random bank of 'fun facts' I tend to draw connections that help me not only understand new material better but recontextualize information that I already had
I also remember information better when it interests me so I often relate, sometimes abstractly, information that I really want to remember to media/characters/etc. I'm interested in and already enjoy.

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I HATE AP EXAMS! Anyways, I had an AP Lit teacher who started off the school year by telling all of us to avoid the AP exam if possible. The class the year before us she encouraged everyone to take the test and each and every single one of them failed. The students came to her and asked what they did wrong and she looked them over, all of them should've passed. So she marched over to college board and slammed them on their desk and she demanded they look them over. Each and every student was switched to passing. Just because pressure was applied. I ended up being the sole person to take the test because I expected to go out of state and paid for it, and of course I failed. Definitely rigged

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Even though the article is from 2005, something I connected to today's teachers is the fact that so many are leaving the schools they are at because of how administration (and outside sources) are forcing a certain atmosphere in the classroom that teachers, and their experiences as an educator, do not agree with. It is worrying that we are almost a decade later and teachers are still needing to advocate for healthy classroom environments.

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AP classes are so extremely problematic, for me specifically it was the AP Lang test. All I feel like I learned in that class was to crank out an essay in forty minutes after speed-reading a piece. I know this doesn't fully connect to the memorization aspect, but I still think it's prevalent in regard to the emphasis on product over process. In terms of memorization, I can't see a time when I would assign anything that would need them to memorize things. Maybe in a presentation, but I would feel kind of evil if I didn't let them use a notecard of some sorts...

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Its interesting to think about the inception of grading, and how it was originally intended for the purpose of ranking, not marking academic achievement. https://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2021/05/where-does-grading-come-from.html

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This is a series of blogposts meant for students who are in courses using grading contracts of some kind to determine their final course grades, or those who just want to understand better what grades are, what they do in classrooms, and how they effect learning. This is the first post in a series of five blogposts meant to address questions about grading and grading contracts. If you're a teacher (or an inquisitive student), you might look at my Labor-Based Grading Contracts Resources page.

This series is a collaboration with the really awesome podcast, Pedagogue (@_Pedagogue_) with Shane Wood. You can listen to me reading this blogpost or use the widget below. But maybe you just want to read it on your own below, or follow along.

***

Q1. Where does the practice of grading come from and what does that history tell us about today's grading practices in schools?
The Beginnings of Grading
It may seem obvious why we have grades in schools and colleges. They provide a way to tell us how well we're doing in a class or in school more generally. But how well do grades actually explain your learning in your courses? How descriptive are they? How exactly do they help you as a student understand your strengths and weaknesses in any performance, or how you might improve or change things, say in a writing course? How well do grades help you develop a complex practice such as writing or communication? If grades don't offer you good answers to any of these questions, then why do we have them in the first place, and why do some of us think grades do answer these questions?

Grading is a technology. Like all technologies, it has biases built into it. Today, we inherit many of those biases from elite colleges' early uses of grading systems. Perhaps the most dangerous bias in grading is its inherent ranking of people and what that ranking suggests not just about what students have learned in classrooms but their very worth as people in society.

The history of grades, which is not very old, can explain not just where grades come from but why we have them in our educational systems, what we think they do there, and the biases that travel with all grading systems. This history may surprise you, and it suggests that grades are not as useful or meaningful in schools as we often think they are.

Today in schools, standards of language are closely tied to the practice of grading students. In fact, standards and grading are almost synonymous. If you are going to grade people, you need a standard to determine what makes an A, B, C, etc. But grades and their standards are not the same things. Believe it or not, the first instances of grading students didn't use standards as we know them today, ones that are about cognitive skills.

Grading as a practice of ranking students by some judgement of performance comes from elite colleges on the east coast, such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. Their original purpose was never about teaching or marking how much a student learned in a course. Grading represented something else.

For the first several hundred years at Harvard, the first American college, students were ranked by social class standing of their families. This seemed perfectly logical to those who were attending college at that time. Technologies of ranking and grading students, while they didn't always look like what we have today, did intend to rank and categorize groups of students based on social worth or social standing of their families.

Where did this kind of social ranking come from? Those who invented the first grading scales and processes came out of a culture and schools in England that assumed a natural social ranking of people. They took for granted that some students were better than other students because they were born into "better" families. These were vital things to keep track of, they thought, because one's social standing indicated one's privilege, merit, and the future positions and jobs that person would assume as their right and responsibility. In many ways, merit and social standing were synonymous. A grade could indicate these things.

Keep in mind that Harvard was founded in 1636 and opened its doors to students in 1638. Its initial faculty came from Oxford and Cambridge in England. In fact, Harvard College was named after the Cambridge man, John Harvard, who donated his library and some of his land to establish the college.

To learn more about early grading at Harvard and other places, see Mary Lovett Smallwood, An Historical Study of Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American Universities: A Critical Study of the Original Records of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Mount Holyoke, and Michigan from Their Founding to 1900. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); and Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner, "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)," CBE-Life Sciences Education, Vol. 13, (Summer 2014), pp. 159-166.

In the same fashion as those English colleges, Harvard was meant to develop the elite young men of colonial New England in order for them to take their places as clergy and government officials. These students were the ones destined by birth to rule the colonies. So ranking students' by social standing was something these early professors were accustomed to since those professors all came from similar elite colleges in England, a country where social class standing was just as, if not more, important than one's economic standing.

All of the grading practices that may have occurred in the first centuries of American higher education are not clearly known. But the first known instance of grading in the ways we do it today may have been in 1785. At that time, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale (seen in the image) created a four category scale that is similar to the A-F scale most schools use now (see also " History of the Modern Grading System"). The Yale scale was based on Latin terms:

Optimi (best)

Second Optimi (second best)

Inferiores (lower)

Perjores (unknown but clearly the lowest)

However, giving students letter or number grades on assignments, or even assigning final course grades, was not something that any college or school did with regularity or consistency until around the end of the 19th century -- that is, just before 1900. And even then, it was not a universal practice.

It wasn't until 1886 that Harvard professors began placing students into five numerical categories, or classes of students: class I, II, III, IV, and V. The first four categories designated some version of passing, while class V identified not passing. But even this simple system appeared to be unnecessary for Harvard professors. By 1895, Harvard moved to an even simpler three category system: "failed," "passed," and "passed with distinction."

In Harvard grade reports sent to parents during the 19th century, students' grades identified the groups of similar students they were in. So a report card would show by subject the class (I, II, III, IV, or V) that the student in question was in. An individual's grades were very much connected to the group of students that the student in question seemed to fit into.

This orientation of gathering students into similarly meritorious groups of students seems to be a carry-over from earlier systems that were based on social class standings. In other words, what seems most important in these early grading systems was to know the group a student fit into. This was supposed to tell you something about the worth and capabilities of all the students in each group.

But why did grading students by their so-called merits become more important by the end of the 19th century? In large part, elite colleges like Harvard and Yale were getting bigger just as the nation was also getting bigger. That is, there were more potential college students, so more students were enrolling or trying to get into colleges. Elite colleges, invested in their social elitism, didn't really want this, or rather, they didn't want certain kinds of people in these elite places.

Grading offered a way to help identify who was acceptable and who was not, even among those accepted into those places. One thing to notice about Harvard's grading, was that most of the grades available were some version of passing, of being okay, proficient. This suggests a bias, and it's not one about being accurate or precise in how much or how well a student knows or learned something. It's a bias about what the grader and college already think of the groups of students they are grading, and what college is meant to provide those groups.

Today, our grading systems still contain many of these old biases. This is why we care about a student's GPA, why we think it says something about their potential to do something else in the future, say succeed in graduate school or do well in a job. But what the early part of the history of grading in colleges shows us is that grading systems started as ranking systems, ranking students not so much by their merit but by their social standing and assumed worth to society. Grading assumes that we can rank everyone along the same scale in any domain of learning and life. Grading is not a natural or neutral practice. It's an artificial and political practice, one that requires the grader to use their standard of things and their judgments of students meeting that standard. Grading may look a little different today, but it contains similar biases as it always has.
Grading to Build A Growing Nation
By the turn of the twentieth century, most U.S. public schools had become compulsory, that is, mandatory. Massachusetts, the state where Harvard sits, was the first to pass compulsory school laws in 1852, but they already had a similar law on the books since 1647, when they were a British colony. That first education law was called, the "Old Deluder Satan Law," and it was mostly about making sure people could read and write in order to read the Bible and not be tricked by the Devil. As the law's opening statement explains, "that old deluder, Satan," might "keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures."

Most states followed Massachusetts' lead. This meant more and more students could qualify to go to college, and more students began going to college, or trying to get in by the end of the 19th century. But from its beginnings in the colonies of America, schools at all levels focused on making good English Christians in a hostile colonial New England, where the Devil lurked everywhere. Perhaps there's no better example of these anxieties, and criticism, of Puritanism in early America as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 short story, " Young Goodman Brown."

By 1900, there were too many students in the existing schools and college systems, systems that were never built for such numbers. Schools were likely getting crowded. Grading those students based on merit came at a time when the fields of statistics and psychological measurement were developing. These fields were gaining strength, and had as their central concerns engineering societies and controlling populations in a new and growing nation with a new growing middle class and a firmly established elite Protestant class.

Between 1860 and 1930, ranking people numerically was about making America great by grouping people for particular purposes, such as deciding who was most fit to be full citizens, who should take on critical jobs, and who should have babies. We're talking about eugenics, state enforced sterilization laws, intelligence testing that led to the growth of the asylum systems in the nineteen century, and other projects based on White racial supremacy.

Oregon illustrates well the anxieties in the nation over education and citizenship at this critical time when grading was established as something we do in schools. Oregon did not pass a compulsory school law until 1922, informally called the " Oregon School Law." The law mandated that all 8 to 16 year olds must attend Oregon public schools. This law was really meant to close down private Catholic schools and convert foriegn-born Catholic immigrants into "Americans," that is, Protestant Americans.

While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the law was unconstitutional, this law illustrates a larger national anxiety around who an "American" really should be and how they become so. Class, race, religion, and language were markers in people that produced this national anxiety by seeming to mark lower or higher merit and qualities in different people. Schools and colleges were understood as one cure for this problem, as they always had been for other social ills, such as the Devil's influence.

Schools were citizen-building factories. Grading was the way to manage all those diverse students and produce the correct kind of citizens. At the time, many students were seen as not meritorious because they were not yet White enough. They were immigrants, Jews, and Catholics, many of whom didn't speak England-inspired English, and didn't come from England. One example of this U.S. anxiety can be seen in an infamous anti-Irish political cartoon of 1889 (see image) in the popular magazine Puck.

Between 1886 and 1925, 13 million new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooded into the nation, many of them were Catholic. Professor Ellwood Cubberley of Stanford, who specialized in educational administration and later would be dean of the School of Education at Stanford, offered a common way many understood these new immigrants. He describes them in his 1909 book on education in the U.S. Professor Cubberley calls the new immigrants "illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government." He concludes that these new immigrants will "dilute tremendously our national stock and ... corrupt our civic life."

To read more on the "Oregon School Law," Cubberley, and 19th and 20th century immigration and schooling, see Lloyd P. Jorgenson, "The Oregon School Law of 1922: Passage and Sequel," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Oct., 1968), pp. 455-466; and David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs, (New York: Basic Books, 2018, originally 2005).

Cubberley's racist ideas were not original or new. They were commonplace. In 1870, Francis Amasa Walker, an economist and statistician who headed the U.S. Census Bureau and was a Boston elite who later became the President of MIT, railed against Catholics and Irish, and against the eastern and southern European immigrants coming to America. Through his census data, Walker saw these new immigrants lowering the birth rates of native born Americans. These new immigrants were bad for the U.S. as a nation, he thought. While they might not be Black or Asian, which were also undesirable, these new immigrants were not English White. Most didn't speak England-English, and too many of them were not Protestant.

At this moment in U.S. history, merit wasn't simply about one's social standing or family background, it was also about one's racial and language backgrounds. Merit was in many ways synonymous with one's perceived race, language practices, and the values and characteristics that allegedly went along with those dimensions of people. The new immigrants at the time were clearly racialized as not-quite White, not meritorious, but could be if they were educated, stripped of their Catholicism or Judaism, and took on the British-influenced English language of the U.S.

Additional pressures, particularly in newly established states like Oregon, created more need for grades in schools. The quickly expanding U.S. needed a larger managerial class, a middle class, and more farmers and technicians. They needed more compulsory public schools and more college students. To address these needs, the Morrill Act of 1862 established land grant colleges, such as Oregon State University. It gave "public" lands previously occupied by indigenous tribes and Native Americans to states and territories of the U.S. in order to finance or establish colleges and universities for this new White middle class.

This group of people would be trained in these new land-grant colleges in "agriculture and the mechanic arts." The purpose of such colleges was White racial nation building. As you might expect, the first Morrill Act did not account for racial discrimination. It essentially allowed it. The second Morrill Act in 1890 did prohibit it, sort of. It had a provision that as long as there was another option for Black students in the state that was funded in a "just" way, which did not necessarily mean equal, things were okay. Think of it as a version of "separate and unequal." The second Morrill Act provided for many historically Black colleges and universities we have today.

While these new land-grant colleges were being established, other anxieties in the country made things like grades important to have as a way to manage groups of students and prioritize some groups over others. How would one know, for instance, the merit of a newer immigrant student from a student whose parents and perhaps grandparents were native to the U.S., meaning they were likely from England, not southern or eastern Europe? What this question really asks is how close to Protestant English is this new immigrant student, who is likely Italian, Greek, Hungarian, or Polish and who may be Jewish or Catholic. Ranking in schools could offer a way to answer this question, since it mimicked the traditions of social and other rankings of people, usually by assumed inherent traits or capacities, which proliferated during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

To illustrate how important race was to merit and one's fitness for citizenship in the U.S, consider Oregon again. In 1850, nine years before the territory was a state, the Donation Land Act granted Whites exclusive rights to own land in the territory. Over 80 years before the 1922 Oregon School Law, the Oregon territorial government and its residents were increasingly worried about Black residents coming in. Despite not being able to own land, Black residents had been excluded from the territory and later the state by Oregon's numerous Black Exclusion Laws (see also Black Laws of Oregon, 1844-1857; and Exclusion Laws). These started as territorial laws in 1844, which by default made Blacks and other minoritized groups, such as Chinese and Japanese, not potential students in the state's schools and colleges. From its beginnings, Oregon was established as a White territory and state.

In fact, section 35 of the Bill of Rights of the Oregon state constitution, ratified by voters in 1857, had officially made Oregon a "no Black" resident and no race-mixing state. While in 1925 the Oregon legislature repealed this section of the constitution, and that decision was ratified by voters in 1926, it explains why to this day Oregon has so few Black residents, currently around 2 percent. Oregon has been a hostile place for Black people, even after the repeal of section 35 of its Bill of Rights. But it wasn't alone. Oregon was following the lead of similar laws in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio, among other states (see also Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and Segregation). These were the places its White residents were coming from.

Schools and colleges in the new states of the West, like Oregon, were the primary places to make the new nation and its citizens, at least the really important ones, the citizens who would make important decisions, run things, and lead the country. Ranking these students along their abilities in language and other areas seemed important in order to find the best and brightest among the racially White and almost White. Grades were an important part of this gatekeeping since they ranked students by how English and Protestant they were in pseudo-scientific and seemingly precise terms. Numbers, categories, and names sounded scientific, especially since they were coming from White authorities. Race and immigration status were tangled up in these ranking systems that all schools and colleges participated in too.

Oregon history indicates the racial, language, and religious anxieties of Oregon citizens and how important they felt such dimensions were to being an Oregonian and an American. There was nothing special about Oregon. The White people in that state reflected larger national anxieties and racism. As Cubberley's comments illustrate, most people at the time assumed that traits and behaviors of people, just like social family status, were inherited or at least a deep part of one's background. Race was understood as a good way to identify a person's capabilities and potential in society, just as language and religion were. No one was arguing against Professor Cubberley's racist statements about the new immigrants. He was stating the common sense of the time. And it took more than 80 years to repeal Black Exclusion laws in Oregon.

Grades were a part of the systems that managed and excluded people in society, which began in elite colleges of the East coast, and multiplied in compulsory schools and land-grant colleges in the latter part of the 19th century. The grading of people in other ways flourished at this same time, a moment when the solutions to engineering a better society were dominated by voices like Cubberley, Francis Galton, and Lothrop Stoddard. These men advocated for eugenics, racial cleansing, and White racial supremacy.

So, where do grades come from and what do they teach us about today's grading? They come from a short history of managing people for very particular, elite White supremacist reasons. Their purposes were to exclude some people from elite places in society, and designate some places for the Whitest and most Christian of people. Their purposes were to rank people in ways that matched the elitist and racist biases of those doing the ranking and engineering of society, the ones who ended up benefitted most from the grading systems. Their purposes were to help build a particular kind of homogeneous, White, monolingual, England-English speaking, Protestant America.

And today, it is very hard to recognize these biases because grades in writing classrooms have been with us for as long as we can remember. And yet, they are a relatively new invention in schools. Their biases for ranking people along social, racial, linguistic, and other dimensions in us are not simply an old fashioned and obsolete way of understanding people in society. These biases are harmful to a more democratic and equitable society and classroom. In short, grading has always participated in White racial supremacy and elitism. Classrooms today can do much better.

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This is a series of blogposts meant for students who are in courses using grading contracts of some kind to determine their final course grades, or those who just want to understand better what grades are, what they do in classrooms, and how they effect learning.

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While my experience was not as intense and uncomfortable as the labeling of reading levels of students in this reading, this made me think of how in my elementary school, students were essentially labeled as being quick math learners or not because of something that our school called the "math license." Students earned this by being able to solve a certain number of addition/subtraction problems in a short period of time and if they were able to complete that, they would be awarded their math license and get to walk around to every other 2nd grade classroom to show that they got it. I was not terrible at addition/subtraction, but I struggled completing the problems in the given amount of time and never got my math license, so I felt like being labeled as someone who didn't have the math license was similar humiliation to the lower level reading students.

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Besides the leveling system, I was also shocked and disturbed by the classroom environment that was enforced in the school. The students weren't allowed to express themselves at all or just act like children. I imagine they must have all been very unhappy, which is damaging to their learning if they don't want to be there. That, combined with the leveling system and constantly being compared to each other, must have made it very difficult to make friends as well since they were severely limited in how much they could talk to each other.

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I was really disturbed by the whole system that was described in the article. The strange rigid signals, enforcement of rankings, and leveling students by ability all felt very dystopian and it blew my mind that this was real.

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I really like the questions Tony raised in his One Pager. By putting students in seperate groups based off of academic success, we are segregating students in a way that is public, demeaning, and dehumanizing. Adolescence is already a hard time for a majority of students, and having each student be publicly labeled as an L1 or L4 learners further creates a divide bewteen struggling students and high-achieving students. By only recognizing high achieving students we are disregarding the other students and the hardwork they have put in during the school year.

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This system seemed almost dystopian in the public grading and leveling system. But the crazy thing is that it's not dystopian- it's real. And these students are labeled with a certain level based on their academic success- how do they move onto levels? Are they grouped there forever? What supports is each level given to make it to the next one? -ER

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Maybe the teachers coming from Ivy League schools thought that teaching would be easy because they learned at these "prestigious" schools, and when they found out it was difficult they jumped ship.

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Every school has a label system like this theoretically. Grades. Whoever got an A vs a D immediately puts a certain label on them. Excellent, Proficient, Assistance Needed, Failed. The only distinguishing feature this school has is that their labels are branded on them for all the public to see. While grades can be kept a bit more private. But regardless, the student gives themselves the label you give them, and they know you know.

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I think labeling someone on reading level is only helpful if the labeling will help them grow, or get the help that they need. School should help the students who are in need of help, not widen the gap and letting the students who are not doing so good flounder or stagnate.

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I think that teachers in inner-city schools could be more compassionate and understanding of their students and treating them more like human beings and less like cadets or soldiers.

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In this case, there didn't seem to be much the teachers could do regarding making their own rules for their classrooms. But in a less structured school, teachers could use group learning where the more proficient readers could work with those who had more difficulty. Having students teaching students can lead to more interaction and more cooperation. This could also have side-effects, like the lower level students resenting the higher level students or the higher level students acting as if they were "better" than those they are helping.

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I do not like the use of "levels" in the classroom, especially in a public setting where students' success is then put on a pedestal or judged by other students. This is not only harmful to students that are considered level 1 or 2, but it also can create a fixed mindset and take away student motivation.
In regards to the second question, I don't think that solely inserting methods of teaching used in majority white schools would work effectively, but rather changing the way we approach students and acknowledging that they are kids first. This approach can be shown differently by many teachers, but the main intention should be a positive experience for students to learn and grow while they are in school.

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One thing that really disturbed me in Kozol's article, that Tony echoed, was the way that students were labeled by their reading level. Like, it was made to be their main identifier! Also our conversation really highlighted the way that enforcing militant, socially-stratified teaching just pushes teachers who care about students (and will actually help them) out of these segregated inner-city schools. It only attracts people willing to be militant, who won't actually help the kids to learn and grow. Sometimes, perks are given to teachers who play into teaching practices that shut kids down... (or at least they don't get fired).

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-interesting the teachers are being treated like drill sergeants
-i feel like the levels are not being catered to the students' needs. we are supposed to hold students accountable and to the same standards. in this case, i feel like they are not holding them to the same standards, which is causing the students to feel lesser than others or better than others. the hierarchy system is failing their students' and they deserve better

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The idea of labeling pupils based on reading level is really uncomfortable, especially in a scenario in which it is ranked and not only does the student themselves know their rankings but others know their rankings as well. It creates a class system based on only a singular skill which has a lot of variability.

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People in general enjoy learning, but when you strip away any of the personal aspects or 'theatrical aspects of teaching,' students will push back against the school system. Learning and growing is incredibly personal and the minute it is no longer made personal, you lose so much of what school should be.