What Can I Salvage?

I don’t think anyone would disagree that this has been a challenging year. As part of the work of the Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community at Plymouth State University, my colleague Matt Cheney wrote a beautiful reflection about the year called Salvage, with its refrain “What can you salvage?” Indeed. What can I salvage?

I read Matt’s piece at the start of the last week of classes. I was worried about the students in my Creating Games class. They had been in and out of quarantine and isolation, had COVID, had broken feet and ankles, sat with parents in hospice, and mourned their parents’ deaths. They had anxiety, and depression, and struggled with motivation. Despite it all, they joyfully worked on the big game project. They had taken the play-testing and feedback process quite seriously and made improvements to their games in response to the play-testing feedback. There was no problem with attendance in the class.The semester was two weeks shorter than normal but these games are among the best I have ever seen in the class. And yet, based on the system of assigning semester grades that I had set up, some students would fail the class.

Because of the shortened semester and because of the pandemic, I cut the work in this class almost in half compared to a “normal” semester. I always give students lots of choice about the assignments they complete. There are currently 24 assignment options in the class. For this semester, students needed to complete seven assignments in order to pass the class and ten assignments in order to get an A.. Two of the assignments were the required game design project and presentation of it to the class during the final exam period. So students needed to choose an additional five to eight assignments to get the grade they wanted in the class. I use a version of ungrading in this class. When a student submits an assignment, I give them feedback on it and if it is not yet complete (usually because they haven’t quite understood the material), they revise and resubmit. There is no limit to the number of times an assignment can be revised. In fact, I want them to revise until it is complete but usually that only takes one additional revision.

We talk quite a bit in the class about the fact that these assignments are all summative assignments that allow them to demonstrate what they have learned. The assignments are divided into three groups, each related to one of the three learning outcomes of the class. We talk about the fact that they need to demonstrate that they have achieved the learning outcomes by completing assignments in each group.

As we headed into the last week of the semester, quite a few students were not on track to complete seven assignments (never mind ten) unless they crammed a bunch of work into five days. To me, that’s the worst way to try to demonstrate what you’ve learned. The work tends not to be of very high quality and seems to me to be a kind of hoop-jumping. And the last thing I want to do is look at a bunch of work that has been rushed through.

I thought about Matt’s question: What can you salvage? The purpose of these assignments is for students to demonstrate what they have learned in the class. How could I salvage that purpose without putting students through the stress of trying to complete multiple assignments in the five days left in the semester when they had other classes to complete, when they had spent the semester working and learning in the midst of a pandemic? I created an alternate assignment in which I asked them to explain what they had learned in the class and to tell me what grade they felt they had earned. I think this is a valuable assignment for all students but I gave students the option of whether to do it or not. After all, there were also a number of students who had been able to keep up with the work all semester and who had already demonstrated what they had learned throughout the semester. I asked those who did the alternate assignment to have a short meeting with me to discuss what they had written in their papers and to talk about the grade they assigned themselves.

The presentations for our two and half hour final exam period took about an hour and a half. The presentations were outstanding, some of the best I have ever seen in the many years that I have been teaching this class. We used the last hour for me to meet individually with each of the students who had done the alternate assignment. In their papers, they told me of the extenuating circumstances (which I had not asked for) that I listed above, not all of which I had known about as the semester progressed. I won’t go into detail about the conversations we had but I am humbled by what the students shared with me. I am awed by what they achieved in such challenging circumstances.

So what can I salvage? These relationships. The fact that my class didn’t add to their trauma. That they learned what they could, much of which had nothing to do with the content of my class. That, in the midst of a pandemic, they had fun learning about how to create games. And I will keep this alternate assignment after the pandemic. There will always be someone whose father is dying, someone who is struggling with anxiety or depression, someone who doesn’t have a quiet place to work.

No one failed Creating Games.

Image Credit: Torment, taken by me on May 9, 2021. Very stressful time for my cat.