Terms of Irritation

I'm not so young now, and not so prone to being lured into energetic disputation. However, I am sometimes irritated enough to fire off broadsides. Occasionally, I have been known to set satchel demolition charges around disputants' positions and blow them up while laughing like a maniac.

Of late, I've been most irritated by the terms 'alternative assessment' (alternative to what?), 'holistic assessment' (see elsewhere in this blog), and 'authentic assessment' (should we be giving inauthentic assessments?). These are silly terms.

Proponents of the first term say it is 'alternative to traditional'. Yeah, and when it becomes established, it will -be- traditional and probably the currently-traditional will have become alternative, no? I am reminded of the so-called 'alternative to practical assessment' which we were offered, and which later became the main mode of 'practical' assessment worldwide.

Proponents of the second term are mostly unable to say whether it is 'assessment of the holistic' or 'assessment that is holistic' that they mean. The former is not possible (the best map is 1:1, after all) and the latter is only slightly more plausible. Unless it means (as it often really does) assessment that offers a quick-and-dirty thumbnail sketch of whatever is supposed to be assessed.

Proponents of the last term are equally unable to say what 'authentic' means. Surely very few people use 'false assessment' or 'fake assessment'? Some change this to 'performance-based assessment', until I point out that 'performance-based' simply means 'based on carrying out whatever was supposed to be carried out'. Which of course says nothing about what is being assessed and how.

Times like this make one wish that education was not so much about hand-waving and vague platitudes, and more about hard thinking and ruthless disputation. Or at least, values. Ho ho ho.

Contextualising Heteroglossic Discourses

Amazing title for a post, for which I have to thank Potash, that most caustic and clever of commentators. I nicked it off the first chapter of his dissertation.

What it really means, of course, is that we take all the wonderfully varied things that different people say about a particular topic and we put them all into some kind of context. It is a rewarding activity; you synthesize stuff, and if you are good, the stuff speaks to you.

By analysing Potash's work, I've come to realise that I am incapable of using that level of discourse in which five-syllable words are routinely bandied about and used in artful ambush of the innocent intellect. He is just too good at it, and I think I need a few more years to catch up — years that I don't have.

But I don't think I need to use five-syllable words. I've come to realise that just as in the stories of primitive societies, great complexity can be found in simple ideas, couched in simple words.

For example, these lines from the great bard of modern Wales:

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true 

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon 

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. 

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Too beautiful for words, almost. The miracle is that he was able to put all that blood and fire into the water of his voice.

Enablers

A thing that enables is an enabler. Enabling is a key piece of jargon in the literature of today. But it means nothing, because you also have to say what it is that has been enabled. Or is it that if you have been enabled, you are relatively no longer disabled? Enabling must imply 'ability'.

It is like empowerment. To be empowered means that you have had power put in you. But what is this power? Is is general power? Power to do what? What kind of power? You have to be empowered to do something — then it is a power that has been given to you, and not just 'power'.

Ability, power — these words used to mean something. But as they became synonyms for stuff some people had and other people didn't have, they became weak things, statistics for some sort of role-playing game, chips in a casino.