Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World by Katharine Beals

Author:Katharine Beals
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

“WHY IS MY CHILD GETTING LOW GRADES?”

Before we become aware of what is going on in their classrooms, the last thing we parents expect of our analytic children is low grades, particularly in the more analytical subjects such as math, science, and foreign language. However, the new classroom practices we discussed above, combined with the new grading practices we discussed in chapter 1, have conspired to brand our children with grades as mediocre as those earned by their more unsocial counterparts. If they’re both unsocial and analytical, so much the worse.

The new grading, recall, replaces “summative assessment,” or grades based on such end products as papers and tests, with “formative assessment,” which focuses on effort, attitude, and performance in classroom activities. Today’s new report card guidelines do allow testing, but discourage short-answer tests, and warn that tests in general should not be the primary basis for grades. Once, high test scores could trump classroom attitude, and teachers, however reluctantly, had to grant high grades to top achievers; now in-class attitude and behavior trump everything else.

The kind of attitude that top grades require, recall from chapter 1, includes such qualities as cooperativeness, enthusiasm, effort, discipline, and, to quote one report card’s guidelines, “independent exploration of ideas and concepts.” But the less engaged you are by the material, the harder it is to summon up the necessary motivation. And the more overwhelmed you are by clutter and lack of structure, the harder it is to display the focused effort that teachers expect. Many of our children are seen staring off into space, kicking their desk legs, humming to themselves, or exhibiting other tics, fidgets, or blank looks, which often are their best means of coping but which make their teachers think them lazy, unfocused, and unable to do the work.

The oral responses targeted by formative assessment have as their most common venue, as we discussed in chapter 1, the informal class discussion, which many left-brainers have so much trouble following that they either say the wrong thing at the wrong time or give up and say nothing at all. Similarly challenging are all the group assignments, which prompt poor ratings for performance in classroom activities.

Formative assessment’s strongest emphasis, samples of finished work, first of all tends to inflate the importance of neatness, visual clarity, and color—particularly when the actual content is as unchallenging as is now typical. Heightening this are the types of assignments that predominate: all those presentations with posters and other visual aids; all those extensive written explanations and reflections required even for math and science; the emphasis in these subjects on visual representations of data. Math tests in particular, according to some report card guidelines, should include things like graphing, drawing, and labeling. No longer do students get separate grades for penmanship: indeed, few of today’s teachers even teach this skill, further impeding the handwriting-impaired. Rather penmanship, graphic arts, and overall neatness are invisibly factored into academic assignments.

Two other left-brain weaknesses, big-picture thinking and visual creativity, are tapped into

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