While we don’t generally admit this to the general public, most teachers recognize that assessment depends as much on the mood of the teacher as on the quality of the student’s work. If the teacher questions the student’s argument, is doubtful of the sources, the grade will reflect that skepticism and doubt. If the teacher believes in the thesis, is accepting of the sources, the grade will reflect that belief and acceptance.
Rather than reflect on our particular mood, our comments are framed in terms of the mechanics of the paper. Was there a coherent argument? Were the sources properly cited? Did the student consider an alternative point of view? We rarely reveal our mood as a reader. We don’t write, “I was in skeptical mood when I read this,” on the bottom of the page. The comments remain objective as if teachers, unlike the rest of human beings, aren’t affected by moods.
In an effort to help teachers think about their moods, Peter Elbow came up with a simple exercise called the Doubting and Believing Game. Those of us who worked with Peter at the Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst began each academic year with a sample student essay. “First read the essay as if you were in a skeptical mood. Jot down your responses in the margins,” he would tell us. Then he handed out a clean copy of the same essay. “Now read it in a believing mood and jot down your responses.”
The difference between the two sets of responses was striking. The first time through I had the posture of a hawk about to strike. I was ready to pounce on every awkward preposition, ready to cut out any redundancy. The second time through I was happy as a child in a field full of wildflowers. Wow! Look at that! These ideas are so cool. It was as if I were two different people. It was as if the student had written two different papers.
People who work in the theater know all about the power of moods. During scene changes, stagehands scurry around the perimeter of the set and across the cat walk, pulling out orange squares of mylar and replacing them with blue ones. Change the gels and the audience will see things differently. We thought we understood a certain character. We thought we knew what was good and what was bad. And then we go through the gel changes and the mood shifts and what was simple begins to look more complex. Human beings are wired in such a way that we feel intellectual pleasure when we start thinking about complex things. We actually like to see how a gel change shifts our way of thinking. We crave opportunities to see how dynamic we really are.
Unfortunately, we forget about these self-reflective pleasures. All too often, we grab a hold of a mood and begin to think that it’s the source of light itself and not just one of many gels. Skepticism fills that role for many academics. We want to appear rigorous, objective, and permanent, so we superglue the cold, blue mylar of dispassion onto the metal gel frame. And then we wonder why we’re dissatisfied with our jobs and our professional conversations. When the mood doesn’t change, we tend to get bored.
The Doubting and Believing Game helps remind us that we can shift the mood of any encounter. This is useful for teachers who actually need to read papers twice, once as believers and once as doubters. When I looked back on my two sets of responses, I noticed something about myself as well as the student’s paper. The doubting notes scrawled in the margin were, at times, missing the point of the argument. The believing responses were blind to inconsistencies. Had I just given one set of responses, the student would have learned more about my mood than his or her writing. My job as a teacher is to integrate the two expressions of doubt and belief into comments the student could actually use.
Teachers aren’t the only ones who need to practice the Doubting and Believing game. Voters might practice this game using the stump speeches of candidates. Get yourself into a believing mood and then listen to each contender. Chances are good you’ll hear things you didn’t notice, particularly from the opposition candidates. Now move into the skeptical mood and try it again. It’s quite likely that you’ll hear new things in your candidate of choice.
Whether we’re looking at presidential or gubernatorial candidates, it’s a good idea to have your gel changes at hand. First, it will make your moods less dependent on the fortunes of each contender. Second, it will make it possible to integrate various points of view into comments we can actually use. Too often our expressions of what we see on the stage are colored by a single mood. We believe in our candidate and what she stands for. We are skeptical of the other candidates and what they have to say. Our responses are as flat as a performance without a lighting designer. We’re actually bored with ourselves but the superglue is fixed and we’ve committed ourselves for the duration of this particular campaign.
It’s true that playing the Doubting and Believing Game in presidential politics may ruffle some feathers. People may not want to hear that their expressions of doubt and belief are matters of moods and not truths. But self-reflection on the whole isn’t a bad thing. The intellectual pleasure of creating integrated comments is real. More real, in fact, than the passing fancy that comes with any mood.
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