The potential and panic of being unfinished.
On our last day at school yesterday, we were asked for the word that best captures the year. For me, there was little question. The word was incomplete. At our school this year, we experimented with a shift in our grading practices that functionally took away students’ ability to receive zeroes on assignments. Instead, they received the dreaded incomplete, which meant that they had to complete the work to get credit in their classes.
And it’s fair to say that the shift was not without challenges. By the end of both semester one and two, some students–including those who probably wouldn’t have failed to turn in work before–were accumulating significant numbers of incompletes in their classes. What was intended to be a systemic change designed to encourage students to actually engage with and learn material turned into a battle to persuade them to turn it in at all.
I think it’s fair to say that the assignments were not the only things that were incomplete; our transition to a new grading approach, even by the end of the year, can be described as incomplete, too, as teachers, students, and parents struggled to navigate changes and understand how missing assessments affected grades.
I’d be lying if I said that the transition wasn’t frustrating, even as a teacher who has always accepted late work, but as I reflected on the idea yesterday, it occurred to me that the idea of something being incomplete doesn’t just extend to student work. It extends to our efforts to remake parts of our school, reconceptualize our teaching practices, and adjust to a world changed by Covid and emerging technologies that compel us to question just what education should look like.
Paolo Freire referred to this idea as a state of being unfinished, which is perhaps a more useful and certainly more optimistic way of thinking. In his Pedagogy of Freedom, he wrote, “Hope is a natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness.”
Freire reminds us that, easy as it is to be reflexively critical and frustrated by the changes rocking education right now—and they are legion and powerful—we can’t lose sight of hope. Hope doesn’t mean turning off our analytical minds and it doesn’t mean accepting all change without question, but it does offer us a framework to see how change could improve our practice at a time when so many forces seem aligned against education.
And the idea of being unfinished offers us hope that we as human beings can keep growing, too. In our lowest moments, it’s probably easy to imagine that our flaws are immutable characteristics, that our past failures define our future, and that who we are has become complete.
There is such fear and such potential in the idea of being unfinished. It makes us responsible not just for the past version of ourselves, but responsible for the person we will choose to become.
Calling an assignment incomplete is a lot like feeling incomplete; it connotes a failure or a lost opportunity. Let’s embrace the idea that we’re all unfinished with all the hope, opportunity, and challenge that suggests.
