Standards v. Specifications

[Picture: Every standard has its shadow. (Smoot)]

A standard, originally meaning the flag that soldiers followed into battle, connotes a moral cause worth dying for. 

I used to count myself as one of those teachers upholding "standards," but now I draw a distinction between "standards" and mere "specifications,"

"Specs" are fine.  I want a car with hatchback.  I want a paper that cites its sources, or I want a personal essay that integrates a real-life experience with reflection on its meaning. In church, I prefer a service that connects present to past through music, ritual, and contextualizing of scripture.

But whenever we make a specification into a moral "standard," we should be aware that every front has its back, every standard casts its shadow -- in Karl Jung's sense of the word "shadow," meaning the mix of qualities we suppress when we choose to present ourselves a certain way.  These may be very good qualities that we suppress for some social purpose -- the way girls [used to?] learn to suppress their intelligence around boys, or a person in authority suppresses his impulse to use clever sarcasm with a subordinate.   

The danger of focusing on the teacher's standards lies in losing sight of a student's other strengths. I learned this the hard way when I overlooked weeks of progress by a girl whose final draft still didn't have the requisite topic sentences; and forcing a talented boy's writing into a formula (read my blog article Assessing Students' Writing with Rubrics: First Do No Harm).

I got a sense of what this must feel like for the student when I once brought a student's essay to a fellow teacher who had disparaged the boy's writing. I wanted her to see how the boy had conceived a distinctive metaphor to shape his essay and had displayed deep understanding of a complicated subject.   She read the introduction and handed the paper back to me, commenting only that there were two misspelled words and a wrong comma. She saw herself as the last bastion of enforcing standards.

What's important?  Is it creative thinking, engagement with the subject, a stretch in the right direction?  Or is it upholding certain specifications as moral "standards?"  Let's not confuse the two.

By the way, my first sentence ends with a preposition, a violation of grammatical standards that derive from a misapplication of Latin grammar rules to English.  As Winston Churchill wisely said, "That is something up with which we cannot put!"