The Case for Hyper-Gradesheets: A Modest Proposal

Abstract

This essay was first presented at a CCCC panel whose project was to examine relations between literary studies and composition studies by focusing on what the organizers called an text. In a companion panel, representative voices from each institution spoke together about Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa, with its call for outrageous opposition to patriarchal institutions. Although we should be the first to say ceci n'est pas Cixous, we nonetheless use her text as a model; we mimic its outrageousness as we look at the institutions that constrain us as teachers of writing and put forth a modest proposal for changing them. We therefore take our charge literally. The institutional text on which we focus is not Professing Literature, Discipline and Punish, English in America or Politics of Letters. Rather, we look at the gradesheet. At the conclusion of each semester or quarter, every university prints a gradesheet on which its faculty is required to evaluate students' performances. Upon this institutional text our educational system might be said to rest. In his provocative book, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Evan Watkins puts the matter succinctly: in the context of work time, it matters less how you were taught Romantic poetry say-what socialization or countersocialization of expectations took place-than what grade you got at the end of the process.