California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: May 8, 2000
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Self Help:

• Understanding the Objectives, Theirs and Yours
• Discovering the Fact Pattern Up soon.
• The Easter Egg Hunt Up soon.
• Answering Questions When You Haven't a Clue Up soon.

  Discussion threads:

• Comments on Exams and Structural Violence
• Comments on Learning and Structural Violence

  Practice:

• Pass or Prepared? for Your Exams Up soon.
• Ask Dear Habermas for Help Up soon.
• The Structural Violence of Exams Essay

Attitude change and persuasion theory emphasize that one of the most important persuasion techniques is to know well your audience. I know, I know, the audience for exams is your teacher, and you think we're too irrational and mean to be knowable. Not so. Most of us really like you. Most of us are unhappy with exams, too. But after you've given them for years and years, you kind of develop a callousness, so that you no longer see the harm of the structural violence. We have convinced ourselves that if you really work hard, it will show in your grade. And we have denied almost completely the many structural barriers along the way to that grade. All I can do about our denial is be aware of it, and not blame you for it.

What you can do about this state of affairs is to recognize that most of your teachers would like to be good guys, would like to see you do well, and mean you no harm. Capitalize on that. What you can also do is recognize that identity is interdependent. How your teacher perceives you and how you perceive your teacher is an ongoing process that is socially constructed.

Your objective is to see that the teacher

• Can see that you read the assignments.

• Gets at least some small piece of evidence that you understood the assignments. Use a term that no one would have known unless they read the material, for example.

• Gets some evidence that you listened to what the teacher said. In your notes, you should have a few of the teacher's favorite words or favorite concepts, and work them into any written responses.

Especially because we talk often of the structural violence of tests, it is important for you to understand where the structural violence comes in. Your teachers to not intend violence. They are pressured by the system to certify the students' competence at the set of skills and tasks that each course is supposed to build. This is one of my objections to tests. They are not about learning; they are about certification, and particularly, about policing certification. Whenever you move to policing without attempting to strengthen internal motivation and achievement, you run the risk of neglecting socialization for competence.

Against a social context which demands immediate and specific accountability, to which I also object in the name of non-violence, teachers must measure learning for certification. More to come . . .

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