. ~ Page A2, Tune 20,1979 -North Shore News, Placing label on a student, or anyone else for that matter, generally shows an inability on our part to see very deeply into what lies below. the surface of the person we are labelling. Many of us do this to - others, but ‘usually we come ta‘realize the shallowness of _ the label we apply. ” Yet. ‘this same type’ of categorizing - is carried out ‘our ‘schools and ever. ‘question the \ Fortunately, however, the method is .being questioned. _Jim McDowell brings out a | So rinwerti facts” in his DOES youn CHILD _HAVEARECORD? By! 1M McDOWELL It's Report - ‘Card. time again. Teachers are ticking off fifty different bits.of data . - about each ‘student and stringing adjectives, together that are supposed to.tell how your child is doing in school. _ Kids are up-tight about what re going to get. Parents are waiting to get the facts.. north | shore news 1139 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, 8.C. V7M 2H4 OFFICEINEWS (604) 980-0514 CLASSIFIED 986-6222 CIRCULATION 986-1337 @u Se Publisher Peter Speck Associate Publisher _ Bob Graham Editor-in-Chiet Noel Wright Managing Editor Andy Fraser News Editor Chris Uoyd | Photos Ellsworth Dickson Advertising Director Eric Cardwell Traffic Manager Donna Champion Production Tim Francis Faye McCrao Classified Bemi Hilliard Administration Andrew Watters Accounts Syivia Sorenson North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent community newspaper § and qualified under Schedule 111, Part 111, Paragraph 111 of the Excise Tax Act, ls published each Wednesday and Sunday by the North Shore Free Press Lid and distributed to every door on the North Shore Second Class Mail Registration Number 3885 VERIFIED CIRCULATION 49,503 Entire contents 1979 North Shore Free Press Lid. All rights reserved. Yet. when it’s all over, nobody will know much more than they did before the crunch began. That's because the whole exercise is a charade — an illusion, an impossible attempt to describe the private ex- perience of learners. To find out why, you have to know what goes on behind the piece of paper your child brings home. Report cards used to be cards, with nothing on them but a few grades everybody understood although they didn’t tell us much. Now these documents are full of meaningless ticks, hasty adjectives, and vague categories like “satisfac- tory,” “needs improvement,” etc. + . And all _this stuff piles up in your child’s Permanent Record filé. Have you ever seen it? Ask for it sometime. It's your right to. see all of it anytime you want to. You may be surprised at what you find in it. The school records of many children are possibly full of gossipy, malicious, damaging pseudo-psychol- ogical observations and phony diagnoses. And all these judgements are made by people who are often incompetent to doso. Some of these labels never come off. They are passed on from one teacher to another. They get thrown around so much by teachers that everyone starts to see the child as a category in- stead of a person. That often includes the child himself. The report card doesn’t ‘““communicate;”’ it categorizes. In place of simple information about your child’s progress you get a smoke screen of non- information that hides the ways in which your child is being slotted, channeled, and stamped with a label by too many teachers. But remember, teachers are well-meaning. Most of them slip into this casual conspiracy only because they, too, don’t really know how to measure a student's progress. That makes many of them unsure and insecure. Then they are told by the system that “we have to be accountable to the parents.” That makes them nervous. Teachers know they are supposed to be experts who have been trained to make “informed, professional, objective” judgements about the product they are ex- pected to turn out: a lear- ning student. But in this game everything ts subjective, It's all personal guess-work. It's impossible to get any so- completely personal that: called objective facts about a child’s ‘progress. as a learner. Tests will never tell us. They only compare your child with an imaginary “average student” who never — lived and never will. So it’s all left to a single teacher to make scores of arbitrary judgements about each of 30 or more children: perhaps 1,500 guesses. No. wonder some teachers pass . around a list of handy ad- jectives to pick from so they don’t write “conscientious, hard working, well motivated” or “reluctant, slow, sometimes stubborn” — over and over. And the ritual goes on year after year. Few have the. courage to point out the obvious fact that no one-can know from the outside how much or what kind of learning is going on inside the child. Fewer throw away this ritual and find ways to ask the learners to judge their own growth» and progress. __. I've done it, and it works. Besides, parents delighted. It took four things: 1) the courage to throw out a ritual we've taken for granted since the beginning of the industrial revolution, 2) the common sense to ask learners to take over a responsibility that belongs to them, 3) the imagination to find ways for them to record their own growth, 4) trust that they could and would do it with some guidance from teachers. This freed me from a useless task so I could be of real service to children who were measuring their own progress each step of the way. It gave me time each day to write a= short description of important things that I had seen three or four of my students do. When these short descriptions and the students own records were discussed with parents a few times a year, (and never all on the same day), all the, parents came to these conferences and most of them said they had a better idea of what was going on in school. The challenge is to see that cach child is a unique individual — you will never find another one like him in the cosmos. A child is not a can of beans. Why do we go on treating them as if they were canned goods? and © were — Every child accompanied by an adult will receive a goldfish absolutely free when they | come to the Fish Bowl, Park Royal. Nothing to buy. No Obligation. . ‘Saturday, June 23 Only! 9:30 — 5:30: In the Upper South Mall facing the mouth of the Capitano River . in - Park Royal 926-1217 Graduation Savings til June 30/79- Suits-20%-30% OFF “Park Hall, Shiffer Hillman & Progress Brand Pants Shirts Sport Shirts Short Sleeve Pierre Cardin Renzo’s Mens Wear 987-2112 Westlynn Mall