Rubric Cube

I see that Blackboard recently improved its LMS by adding an outcomes widget. Outcomes. Assessment. A culture of assessment. Continuous assessment. I'm not sure that it really matters what one teaches; the teacher's mission is to engage in a culture of continuous assessment.

I keep hearing that to live the life of assessment (or is the life of outcomes?) the teacher must have specific goals and objectives and how one measures the outcome of the goals and objectives and that this is best achieved by stuffing things into a rubric. Why does the word "rubric" always sound obscene? At any rate I think of a rubric as three-dimensional though I find it odd that the people who most often speak of rubrics are fairly two-dimensional people.

Presumably all this outcomes measurements activities goingson have to do with taking minds and adding to them. People who speak of outcomes and assessments also tend to use the phrase "value added."

I recently realized that one of the things that keeps me hostile to the crowd of outcomers is that I often see my task as removing things from minds. The outcomers want to measure learning outcomes. They give me no method or rubric to measure unlearning outcomes, and unlearning opportunities jump out in the classroom at unexpected moments. Ah. Writing. Wonderful. Writing suddenly reveals an answer to the nagging issue that got you started. The outcomers have no interest in education. Most likely they have no interest in education because education does not yield itself to outcomes and cannot sleep inside a rubric.

Remove education from a professor's concerns and suddenly the professor becomes round and fits the hole.

I think something gets lost. Well, something has already been lost. I think the outcomers are trying to get me to give up something important. Something sacred. I will not become a rubric cube.