Portfolio Response (to, not made of)

I’ll try to limit myself to just two paragraphs. Not even John Updike paragraphs.
Portfolios can assess three different categories (at least in Clarke County): achievement, creativity, and motivation. I’m stuck on the motivation part. I guess if you’re motivated enough to complete a portfolio that may end up taking eighteen months (sheesh, children have been planned, debated, rejected, accepted, conceived, and born in less time), then you are truly motivated. Wouldn’t motivation be a factor of any portfolio? I guess if you’re not too independent with it, you’re not too motivated. Time bothers me a lot with these portfolios. I spend most of my time designing assignments that are less than a week or two in duration because of the relatively short attention span of most of my students. Whether this is a perceived attention span or reality, I’m not sure. Maybe my kids could handle an assignment that lasts all semester long. With our block schedule, that’d only be four months or so.

I think we as teachers are portfolio creators. When we sit down to design a semester’s worth of work, we try (sometimes) to develop common themes. My tenth grade classes are all about death and failure. The texts we have—Julius Caesar, Things Fall Apart, Lord of the Flies, Antigone, Night (Holocaust)—all concern themselves with the failures of mankind. I joke that there are no happy moments in tenth grade. You’re not a freshman anymore, so you can’t use that excuse. And you’re not a big kid yet. Even the name, sophomore, means wise fool. They can’t win.

I would be (holy crap, third paragraph—don’t count the first one as a paragraph) terrified to grade a portfolio, a true portfolio. Too many variables, too much that could be left open to interpretation. There is also, for me, too much room for the personal feelings of the judge influencing the assessment of the product. Our guest speakers made an offhand comment that if they were confronted with a portfolio that looked like money, looked like it came from Hobby Lobby and dear old Mom and Dad spent their hard earned cashola on the decorations, it would be almost immediately dismissed. But what if? What if the expensive supplies were used in creative ways? What if, too? What if I just don’t understand what the kid was trying to do? What if, again? What if the kid had no clue what he was putting in the portfolio and is just good at making crap up when he’s explaining it. Too many what if’s for me.