I think I finally got all the typos in my last blog post, lol!

We were thinking about fourfold rubrics of criteria used to teach, assess/evaluate.  In the history of Metaphysics from Plato to Heidegger, you have the basic idea that the really real is not the “present” thing in front of you (me on – deficient being), but what it “re-presents” (alethos on – really real or true being). [1] And it makes sense to think according to this paradigm since the philosophers were teachers, and this is how teachers think.

In the writing assessment exemplars I discussed, they presuppose a holistic student approach involving teacher, student, parents, learning resource teacher, etc.  In my May postings for Secular Web Kids I outline some of my favorite teacher instructional strategies.

The irony though is that when we look at assessment and evaluation as classically performed by teachers the specific student/product/teacher aren’t involved in the process at all.  When we looked at the writing example, it was a matter of indifference with the exemplar who wrote it or what they wrote or who the instructor was.  The writing sample, and there were two examples at each achievement level, only mattered insofar as the particular piece re-presented a level of criteria in the rubric.  The classic instructional process is machinic in this regard:  Teachers establish where a student is on the developmental continuum (e.g., First Steps Writing Continuum), and then target what needs to be taught to move them along.  The actual piece of student writing (or a portfolio collection) is not the “really real,” but merely a symptom of what is really going on with the piece expressing a level of the rubric criteria.  When the Derridean Caputo quests against “Criteria,” this is an entirely different education model all together.

I hope you enjoyed my posts this year, and I’ll see you in the Fall.  Have a great summer!

NOTES:

[1] “Metaphysics” in Philosophy refers to the ultimate presuppositions of “somethings” in general. It is sometimes misrepresented as the fundamentals of physics and so what we would mean by the current scientific paradigm of quantum physics, but this is based on a misunderstanding of what “physis” means in Greak philosophy where the word “Metaphysics” comes from. So, if I say the mansion ‘appears’ as houseness incarnate, houseness merely appearing/presencing in the average house, and houseness appearing deficiently in the dilapidated shack, this presupposes the beings in movement/appearing, and so the source of movement. In this way, Kant titles a book “Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals” which is the philosophical system of moral laws derived entirely from pure practical reason, establishing unconditional duties that apply to all rational agents. The Groundwork is the prolegomenon (introductory study) to that system (which he later develops more fully in the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797). This is a far cry from “quantum metaphysics” or speculative ontology—it’s disciplined, reason-based moral philosophy at its most rigorous. We might think back to Homer’s use of “beings” as “eonta,” which didn’t only include the physical beings of nature but all “somethings rather than nothing” like the perplexity of the leaders. We mean this by “thing” in English when we say “He knows his things, that which is pertinent to him,” which is also what the Roman word “res (thing)” conveys.