Oh, good heavens. I
missed the Barracuda's phone call while I was running a twenty minute errand first thing... AUGH!!
Now I have to try to persuade her to call me again.
I don't think that's unusual for a perfectionist. The first time they don't get an A on something they break down and cry, often not out of grief but out of relief, they no longer have to worry about being perfect.
Hmmm, well, I think that depends on the perfectionist in question. DD sometimes takes it pretty well if she doesn't get 100%. It depends ENTIRELY on whether or not she interprets the situation as one in which her "best" should legitimately guarantee her 100% or not. In any situation in which she feels that is so, this becomes problematic. In this instance, her best is VERY definitely "100%" in any estimate, and considerably less than her best
should be... but now she's been placed into a scenario where because of the teacher's desire (which was altruistic, but misplaced) to teach her a larger lesson, she now MUST earn 100% to achieve the 'reasonable' outcome. Bottom line, the teacher opted to use a high-value, summative assessment in a
formative manner, but he was too heavy-handed and missed the mark.
The reason we're not having ANY problems like this with AP Lit is that any one writing assignment is only 1% of the course grade. Those are
formative assessments, and therefore more tailored/subjective grading is fine there. Those are intended to 'shape' the student, and they are pretty relentless in terms of demand. This has been an IDEAL course for my DD, and probably one of the single healthiest experiences of her school career with this educational entity.
That's a much, much better situation for a perfectionist, as it forces them to actually work toward a goal OTHER than perfection, and to regard the learning process-- not the results-- as important.
Similarly, in college coursework, while it is true that grading may be subjective... subjective grading TENDS to be on formative low-value or high-frequency student work. Homework, weekly work, etc. There is a chance for the student to learn what sort of responses are expected.
I would NEVER have graded a midterm exam this harshly without the six to seven in-class quizzes, five weekly problem sets, and four lab reports leading up to it, which should give students LOADS of feedback about all of the little things that I looked for on extended answers (showing your work, explaining thought process logically, focusing on "why" not just "how," etc.). I also didn't grade EXAM answers with the same sort of rigor that I did outside-of-class writing in terms of usage/conventions or clarity/flow. Basically, exam answers
are about that overall "does the student have a great, good, mediocre, or poor grasp on the principles behind this question?" I certainly DID demand good written English on lab reports and term papers. But to do so with exams and quizzes was unfair to students who struggled with those things, and frankly, it
wasn't an English course. (It was chemistry.) Communication on those things simply had to be good enough to let me see the student's understanding (or lack thereof). In other words, if I could SEE that the student had sophisticatd and thorough understanding of the concept... I might dock 10-20% for not explaining it well... but I wasn't going to punish form over substance with a student who had
mastery. So while I quite thoroughly understand where this teacher is coming from, and to some extent I support those pedagogical preferences myself, I think that this model doesn't support that pedagogy very well-- and he's being grossly internally inconsistent and doesn't even see it, and he doesn't 'know' the students well enough to be doing what he's doing. AND he's running smack into some major roadblocks created by my daughter's asynchronous maturity and her GT perfectionism.
:SIGH: Hopefully I can talk to Ms. Barracuda about our concerns over tweaking DD's hard-won voice as a writer for the purpose of one idiosyncratic teacher. That part is a maturity thing-- I'm just not sure that DD is
ready to alter her writing style THAT radically to suit different teachers and not have it impact her natural core voice as a writer.
