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 third-grade science teacher who assigned a report when the students did not know how to write a paragraph, let alone an essay. He assured me they would learn these things in language arts at some future time. His subject was science and he still expected his students to write a report.

Not being able to buck the system, I took it upon myself to teach my kids how to write. We made outlines, talked about introductions, conclusions, topic sentences, punctuation — you get the picture. They wrote first drafts by themselves and then we talked about how they could be improved. I don’t remember any of them complaining about this bit of home schooling. In fact, all three of them have told me how much they appreciated it as they went off to college and careers.

Fast forward to my grandchildren’s generation and I am even more disappointed about the low status of writing in their educations. Instead of learning to write a proper essay, they get…