Rigormarole*

Before the start of the school year, I attended what can best be described as a staff pep rally at the school where I am doing my student teaching. From my experience as a para-educator and what I’ve seen on You Tube, this is standard practice for most schools, and it isn’t a bad idea. We need to remember our goals and be united in our motivation to pursue them. Two speakers from the district office and several members of the administration spoke to the group gathered in the gym. Along with acknowledging the excitement of starting a new year at a brand new facility and what that indicates about the importance the community places on education, the need for rigor emerged as the unifying theme of the meeting.

Rigor seems to be one of the buzzwords in education lately, and for good reason. Our students deserve a rigorous and thorough education that will help prepare them for whatever futures they decide upon. While we pay lip service to rigor and set up complicated systems of standards and testing and teacher monitoring in the name of achieving it, rigor often eludes our actual practice. There are many reasons for this. Not all students come prepared to the same degree to learn, and, as much as we want a level playing field for all students, achieving an environment and preparing lessons that are equally accessible to all students may not be entirely possible. Yet I wonder if the systems we put in place to ensure rigor are not sometimes at fault.

One of the most unsettling trends I have noticed is the push for quantity of literature to read and writing assignments to complete over quality—all in the name of rigor. Too many teachers feel pressed to cover a specific amount of material by the end of the year or before students encounter it in state testing, which causes them to push through at a rate determined by their calendars and instructional guides rather than what students are able to handle. Students are frequently overwhelmed by this pace and move through lessons, readings, and assignments without understanding, connecting, or retaining, much less mastering the material or making any meaning from it. While an increased number of assignments gives the appearance of holding students to a high standard, this approach amounts to teaching the subject rather than the students. Good teaching practice requires fitting the curriculum and schedule to student needs.

Randy Bomer stresses the importance of writing as a process in Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms. In reference to this process he states that “Making quality things . . . is not simply a matter of having high standards; it’s more a matter of strategically lowering one’s standards when it’s time to make a first move, and also being able to raise them progressively across the revision process” (Bomer 204). This approach emphasizes the importance of scaffolding student learning by building on the previously laid foundation and providing plenty of time and opportunity for practicing the skills taught. By shifting the focus from speed and quantity to process and quality, teachers can promote true rigor and purposeful learning that surpasses the ability to churn out shallowly developed essays only good enough to meet the benchmarks on formal assessments.

*This is an intentional misspelling and re-purposing of rigmarole/rigamarole (both correct spellings).