Common

One of the first things I learned when I started teaching is that fair and equal are not synonyms. Perhaps Dr. Richard Curwin, co-author of Discipline with Dignity and contributor to EduTopia, can explain:

Students are not the same. They have different motivations for their choices, different needs, different causes for misbehavior and different goals.

No one would go to a doctor who treats all headaches the same, since the cause for one may be allergies and the other a tumor. Identical treatment for two students who don't do homework for different reasons -- one who has to help at the family business after school, and one who watches too much television -- is no different than that crazy doctor with the single cure for all headaches.

These days, though, there is a hard push toward standardization of everything school-related. Not only are teachers and administrators encouraged, or even required, to treat every student the same in regard to discipline and achievement, but we are also being herded into systems that require considerable homogenization of our teaching practice.

Today a presentation on the merits of common formative assessment was made to our staff by some of our colleagues as part of a school-wide book study. It was a well-intentioned overview of chapter 2, and one of the powerpoint slides offered a couple of definitions of the word "common."

One was, collective, communal, and the other was familiar, popular, general.

All very warm and fuzzy, but as an English teacher I know that's only part of the story. I was struck by the definitions they left out:

ordinary, average, unexceptional

not to mention

uncouth, vulgar, coarse, unrefined, unsophisticated