Throughout my schooling I was always considered “quiet” in class, not because I had nothing to say, but because I had nothing to say at the moment it was expected.  I had my best ideas after class, halfway down the hall. Oh, if only I could have thought it sooner!

Eventually I found out I could salvage those good ideas by writing about them later, and so I became better known to my teachers as a writer than a talker.

Now I am a teacher and I am expected to say things on time. Sometimes I do, especially if I failed to mention that thing in the previous class or in the same course last year.  I am still a slow thinker.

Donald Graves appreciated “slow thinkers” and wrote with fury about the standardized tests that penalized slow thinkers. He died a month ago, and I immediately knew I had something to say in tribute.  But . . . it all slowly materialized while back-logged teaching responsibilities ascended to the fore. No it’s 1 a.m., and I can’t blame slow thinking for this delay.

In his collection of essays Testing is not Teaching Graves deplores the endemic testing of school children for how it deforms learning. “With the stakes for students, teachers, and school children thus fixed, we bend our instruction to both raise and identify only one kind of thinker. Given the concurrent erosion of time in the school day, we make haste to teach quickly as well. Virtually all tests are timed, and the only questions supplied are from the testing agency. Long-thinkers usually formulate their own questions” (54).

Grave cites James Gleick’s Faster (1999) as a critique of the demand for fast thinking in our culture. Gleick writes, “Much of life has become a game show, our fingers perpetually poised above the buzzer. We’re either the quick or the dead. To be quick it used to merely enough to be alive. Now we expect repartee and fast response times too” (in Graves, 53).

Donald Graves was famous as a “kid-watcher.” He spent much of his life in classrooms, trying to figure what kids were thinking. Nancy Atwell told how he came out from a classroom bursting with excitement about what kids were doing after she had been convinced nothing was going on in there.

“I remember my first encounter with a long thinker,” he wrote. In his school students were encouraged to specialize in a subject. Brian studied the whaling industry for six months. He read, he interviewed, he constructed a whaling boat and dramatically reenacted the hunting of whales. “Brian provided a vision for other children in the school of what it meant to know a subject well, but also helped them recognize that it took months to achieve that vision” (54).

Graves was one of the earliest promoters of portfolio assessment.  In portfolios he saw the opportunity for students to collect their best work, to improve on it over time, and to reflect on its qualities in its final form.  Portfolios have risen and fallen in popularity in his lifetime. A few states have labored to make them ultimate assessments for writing. Most have regarded them as too labor-intensive, disregarding the intrinsic value of putting them together and thinking about them.

Beyond his love for children, his fascination with learning, his devotion to the Boston Red Sox, Graves was an advocate for teachers.  His passing leaves us one champion short.

“When teachers administer skill-and-drill methodologies unthinkingly, their own intellectual abilities and judgments are seriously affected,” he warned. “But when they focus on what a child knows, they begin to see the potential in their own thinking. Thinking and respect for others’ thinking is the foundation of our democracy” (94).  I hope others will take this message and rise up to speak for slow thinkers.

Quotations from Graves, D. H. Testing is not Teaching: What Should Count in Education. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.