Ball Babies

As is often the case, the highlight of last week came at tennis practice.

A seventh grade boy who's new to tennis, but very athletic and picking it up quickly, joined two girls who play happily together at the bottom of our ladder. I had overheard the pair create a game as they started warming up: they'd name the ball, then count aloud how many times they got it over the net in succession as they played a short game, and consider the total number of volleys the age their 'baby ball' reached before dying (being hit into the net or out of bounds). I raised an eyebrow when I heard one gleefully cry to the other, "You murdered our baby! She was only nine!" and seeing me do so only intensified their giggles.

I was, naturally, very curious to see what he would do when he realized that this was the short court warm-up they'd begun. He's a sweet and tender guy, I didn't know how he'd respond to this silliness, and I was pretty sure he hadn't realized what they were doing. Creeping closer to their court, I heard one girl start to explain, interrupt herself and say, "You'll see." Sure enough, she named the ball Bella, started hitting it over to her partner, and when Bella failed to clear the net at a young twelve years old, the girls lamented that she never got her driver's license, or went to prom, or got into college. As soon as they were done with their faux eulogies, one girl plucked a ball from the hopper, turned to the boy, and said, "Ok, what do you want to name this one?"

This boy - the son of a former pro athlete, who wrestles and roughhouses on the basketball courts every day at recess, who sticks around at the end of practice to hit hard against the wall, who serves with power and intensity these girls don't even dream about - didn't miss a beat.

"Paul.  Paul the Ball."

My heart melted, even more when Paul met a tragic end (at only eight!) and the boy who named him  moaned, "He didn't even make it to middle school..."

A Random Thought on Rubric Writing

I'm a bit of a rubric-aholic. I fastidiously tweak rubrics I've had and been using for years, and fiddle with formatting ad nauseum. While my attention to these details tends toward the obsessive, it's because I do feel so strongly that students desperately need clear guidelines and expectations to be set forth in order feel that they can reach the defined benchmarks.  On the other hand, I worry sometimes that in my effort to be explicit, I'm encouraging formulaic responses, and becoming too prescriptive about what final products should be.

I was talking about this tension with a colleague who summarized it thusly (thanks, Erik!): We want the task to be ambiguous, but the path to success to be clear. That is, we want students to have opportunities to exercise choice and interpret some goals for themselves, but also to understand with certainty what would define a successful or effective output.

What a paradox! I suppose it's not too different from advice I once heard in an education class: don't let the scaffolding become the house.