Life is Not a Rubric

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Supposedly, Einstein wrote this on a blackboard, although others credit William Bruce Cameron instead of Einstein. Regardless of the source, I have always liked to view life through this lens. In my experience, many things are subjective and difficult to quantify. I found this to be especially true in evaluating my students’ essay writing when I taught high school English.

Back in that era, reading and discussing quality literature was essential to being able to write well. Student assignments focused on topics related to what we were reading, and we were required to assign one essay per week. In addition, I had my students write in journals, which were not graded or corrected. This was a way for me to know them as individuals and for them to write without fear of receiving a poor grade. Taking an English class meant combining the skills of reading and writing.

Somewhere along the way, writing became an afterthought, separated from reading. By the time my children entered elementary school in the late 70s and early 80s, reading was ability grouped with little emphasis on language structure or phonics. No more diagramming sentences. I’m not sure that was especially helpful to creating good writers, but it might have been nice to learn what a sentence was; where to put commas and periods rather than the long run-ons that seemed to be good enough; and how to construct a good paragraph. I remember getting into a disagreement with a…