My colleague Joe likes to quote “question the hell out of everything” (and thank goodness). And so, when we attended a meeting recently where we were trained to be community portfolio reviewers for a constructivist high school in the area, it shouldn’t have surprised me to have him say as we left: “This is great. But really, though– how do we really know what our kids know? No matter what measures we use?”

He’s right, of course. The challenge teachers contend with every day is that we cannot (yet) pop our kids’ heads open like a Coke can and see what’s inside. We settle for the next best thing, which is to find valid and reliable means of assessing our students’ behaviors. But no matter how clever and penetrating this assessment is, it still stops short of truly knowing another’s mind. And for the entirety of my teaching career, I have treated this as a problem to be solved.

But perhaps it isn’t a problem at all. Perhaps, in the end, it is exactly the way things should be.

Einstein put it this way: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Lowell Monke, in his article “Unplugged Schools” in the October 2007 Orion Magazine, then applies this idea to our students. “Some facet of a child’s inner life must remain sacred– off limits to our machinations,” he writes. “It should be viewed not as new territory for scientific investigation and technical manipulation but simply with awe and reverence and our own best, most human, expressions of support.” And this is exactly the fact that keeps our innocent hero Andy alive in the amazing movie “Shawshank Redemption” (check out how here).

Now, we’re not all going to be imprisoned in a 1960’s penitentiary falsely accused of murder. But we are going to be faced with pressures to act immorally, destructively, or simply in a way which is not in accordance with our authentic selves. And the fact that we all possess this autonomous core may be the only thing that saves us. 

Can I then let my assessment do what it does well, and then trust the rest? Trust that honoring the core selves of my students will bear good fruit– perhaps precisely because they know I trust them? Should I risk intruding on this core self simply because I want to figure out if a kid really knows what the central metaphor of The Great Gatsby is?

This is not a plea to abandon assessment. Is is, I think, a challenge to accept assessment’s limitations– and even to consider those limitations as healthy and appropriate. 

Is one of the best things we can do as teachers is– well– leave those kids alone?