Comment Victory #1

As I start to describe the process of evolution of teacher comments, I need to explain the setting. I was not a prep school kid and I ended up at Loomis Chaffee almost by chance. I could not have had better luck.

My teaching colleagues and the administration were some of the most talented, generous, professional and friendly people I could have found. I was privileged to be mentored and guided in my academic career by some of the most patient and caring friends I could have asked for. Many were highly respected scholars and infectious life-long learners.

Loomis Chaffee is a boarding school and many of us were “triple threats”. That meant that we taught, coached and helped in the dorms. We ate breakfast at the dining hall together, had lunch together, coached with or against each other in club sports, lived in the same dorm, had family style dinner together, watched the games on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and often attended evening faculty or department meetings together. Our young children were classmates and often our social life was dinners or barbecues together. We were all one big family.

But in 1988 almost none of these people had a computer or had ever thought about getting one. So it was my challenge to guide these friends and the school through a complete cultural and workstyle change—and I was the new kid on the block.

For a year or so three of us on the faculty had converted to writing our teacher comments on a word processor—an Apple II computer. There were several advantages to hand writing them. One was obviously legibility, but also you could spell check and cut and paste paragraphs like a summary of the term’s work. Also when hand writing, you could not make changes on the fly. Humorously you might start a sentence one way and realize it was not what you were hoping but you would have to just finish the sentence with something that fit. Otherwise you had to cross the line out or start over on a fresh form, adding all the other data.

The challenge for each of us was then getting the comment printed onto the triplicate comment form in the right areas. There were spaces for the date, the student’s name, the grade, the course name and section number and then the comments. Using a primitive word processor and a dot matrix printer to correctly put all the info in the proper place took hours of adjusting. That is what the three of us had done and we had found 3-4 friends each who would use our template. But that was 12 teachers out of 100, so the parents were receiving comments with 10% neatly typed comments and the rest the usual variety of style and quality.

Each marking period more teachers began to try the new method and soon I had about 20 teachers using my template. The Dean of Faculty met with me and suggested that we transition ALL the faculty to one of the three templates. By this time I was 1/4 time technology coordinator so I had official duties that were evolving and this was one.

I told her that I would NOT support three templates. Everyone had to use the same one. Distributing it, supporting printing problems and training colleagues would only be possible with ONE method. Reluctantly, after meeting with the admin team, she agreed and we decided to use mine.

The elephant in the room was that 50% of the faculty still had no computer and probably 10% were very stubborn curmudgeons who simply would not make it easy.

There was a subset of faculty in the prep school world who lived a very cozy, traditional existence. The seasons of sports, the vacations, the faculty gatherings and the summer on the Vineyard were simply their way of life. For some, comment writing was a special time of year where they would spend gentle evenings in front of the fireplace, with a lab curled alongside, sipping brandy and perhaps with a pipe as the imparted their wisdom in longhand to their waiting pupils. An idyllic vision. It had been so for decades.

To suggest that now they would go to some computer lab with a newfangled machine and peck away for hours seemed almost like hell. They had no idea how to turn the thing on or how to operate it. And they had no interest in changing that situation. 

There was a small number of hard core holdouts, but the system would not work if we were not 100%. So the Deans came up with an ingenious solution. For the next two marking periods, the school would hire a person to type the comments of those faculty who wished to write longhand. After that, the faculty person would have to pay their typist themselves.

About 10 people took up the offer. Some just dumped their comments at the office to be typed but most sat alongside their typist in order to edit or correct things along the way. Once they saw that they could make changes on the fly, and that they could paste their first paragraph into each comment, they started asking the typist if they could do some. By the end of the second period, 100% had been converted!

Some had me help them buy their own computer and I went to many houses to set them up. Some came to me during free periods for extra help and soon some were even converted into real cheerleaders for the process and technology in general.

It was a huge moment for the school.