Maria revisited
I recently gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate teacher training course on campus. I spent 45 minutes talking about epistemic games, and specifically my work on Urban Science, and then answered questions from the 30 students. Not surprisingly, the students were interested in the demographics of epistemic game players, buying the games and implementing them in their classrooms, and curious about the long-term effects of epistemic gameplay on achievement. When I addressed the last topic, I told the story I previously wrote about here, the story about Maria’s social studies assignment and her creative solution to the task. In the middle of telling the story, one of the students emphatically raised her hand and shouted out, ‘Was that last year?’ I told her it was and the student went on to say, ‘I was in that class! I was observing that class and Maria’s assignment was phenomenal! I totally remember her work!’
‘Well, Maria thought that she did the assignment wrong,’ I replied.
‘I can’t believe that. Her map was amazing. She had the entire city zoned for specific uses,’ responded the student.
‘Maria said that all of the other kids drew houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys and trees in the lawn.’
‘They did, and they were totally lame,’ the student said decisively.
But that’s not what Maria thought. Since her work looked nothing like her peers’, she assumed that she had done the assignment wrong. She even threw it away shortly after receiving a grade (an A) on it, not recognizing her own innovation since her teacher hadn’t.
That’s why I was excited that the student remembered Maria’s work a year after she had observed her class, and I followed up by talking with the teachers-in-training about the messages we too often send our children in school, the message that their work is little more than a means to a grade. I hope that Maria’s story helped some of the students think outside of the traditional ‘assessment box’ and inspired them to reflect on how they measure success in their classrooms.
