Come to the Edge

One of my honors freshmen -- let's call this one Athena -- introduced me to a poem by Apollinaire called "Come to the Edge":

Come to the edge, he said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them...
And they flew.

It's a lovely evocation of a teacher's mission, as I understand it - to coax a student to the edge of what he or she thinks is possible, and then push. The trick is knowing whether that particular student will fly or, as my colleague Jill Lawler just said, looking over my shoulder, "go splat!"

Where is the edge? It's different for every student and, as Jill added, "most of them think it's right at their feet all the time." For some, it truly is. Learning disabilities, self-destructive behavior, or a chaotic home life can make writing an essay, reading a challenging book, or even getting to school on time seem impossible. For others, like Athena, the edge is so far away that I can barely see it. She may not find a truly frightening cliff until she gets to college or beyond.

There are different kinds of edges, too. For all her brilliance, Athena is reluctant to speak up in class. I had another student, a joyful and passionate writer, whose volcanic temper constantly threatened to land her on suspension. Forbearance and self-control are her personal precipices.

Where this becomes a teacher's problem, of course, is finding some fair and consistent way to grade students' work. ConVal has some classes that are grouped by ability, but there are also "heterogenous" classes open to all ages and levels of ability. I teach two of them: Creative Writing and Mythology.

Creative Writing allows me the most leeway to adjust my expectations according to the proximity of the edge. I grade those students by the number of "quality pieces" they write; although we set up a quality rubric as a class, I am the sole judge of what meets that standard. So I can reward a student who struggles to write a complete sentence for work I wouldn't accept from another with more talent.

Mythology is trickier. Our text is tough sledding for a lot of my students, and that's why all the quizzes on it are open-book. Most of life's tests, I've found, are open-book. Even so, some kids have problems. When I investigated why some of them couldn't complete a 50-question objective quiz in 84 minutes, I discovered that they had no idea how to use an index. Say the question were about Icarus, the headstrong boy who flew too close to the sun with his wax-and-feather wings, and went splat. They would start on page 1 and patiently thumb through the ""0-page textbook looking for his name.

This quarter, I'm going to find out early who the problem readers are, and read out loud to them from a good children's book on Greek mythology. That's what mythology is, after all: storytelling. For the others I'll fashion waxy wings and urge them to fly -- but not too close to the sun.