I Checked the Rubric.
Shane brought home a giant piece of paper from school and put it on our table.
This was different. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s my history homework,” he said. “I have to finish a poster about the Stamp Act.”
I have never heard of the Stamp Act – or had forgotten it long ago, since I never had much interest in history. “Have fun with that,” I said.
Later, with the poster still on the table, I looked it over. I learned a little about the Stamp Act. Well, I learned a lot about the Stamp Act. In fact, Shane’s poster looked like it was done already.
“Did you finish your poster?” I asked Shane later.
“Not yet,” he said. “I still have to add one more sentence to the paragraph on the bottom.”
And later, he added one sentence to the paragraph on the bottom. Then he was done.
It seemed to me to be a lot of trouble, carrying the giant piece of paper home on the bus, carefully getting it inside (in spite of the rain) and having a spacious spot to finish it.
So I asked Shane about it. “Why did you do all that?”
“Well, I knew I still had more to do, but we didn’t have any more class time. So I did it at home.”
“How did you know you still had more to do? It looked like it was already done when you brought it home.”
“I checked the rubric,” Shane said.
“You checked the rubric,” I repeated, somewhat stunned.
For the uninitiated, a rubric is not a cube made of colored squares. A rubric is a list of exactly what is graded – and how many points it’s worth – on a big project.
Dylan had been ignoring rubrics for years. In fact, I had spent years trying to get Dylan to look at rubrics, so that he could stop losing dozens of points because he didn’t answer an important question, add a drawing, or put his name on the paper.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “It’s pretty easy. I mean, it basically tells you everything you need to put on the poster, and then you just have to put it on there.”
“Yeah,” I said, still a bit stunned. “Rubrics do make things a lot easier.”
Sigh.