Sitting by/ in council/ as assessor

http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/5139/assideo-assidere-assedi-assessus

I've had the privilege of being taught by classicist, Dr. Erika Harnett every year of my high school career. This year, 30 years later, she taught my youngest child in her final year of teaching at the school in which I now work. Erika made me feel like I could " do it" at a time in my life when school was difficult. She was and is a no nonsense, but she also makes her students laugh and they know how much she cares for them. We will really miss "Doc". 


 It's also exam time at my school. I've shared my frustrations with one size fits all traditional assessments before, I'm not really going to do that here, at least not directly.

Doc's classroom is next to my office. In these last weeks of school, I've been thinking about her Latin class and the Latin I've mostly forgotten. I do remember one of my favorite activities in her class was when she would put a Latin word on the board and our task was to figure out the many English words came from that Latin root. I was and still am fascinated by the journey of language. I thought it so cool that the Latin word for room, camera gave us the words "chamber" via the French which retained its original meaning and our word camera because the original cameras of the 19th century were little rooms. I still like to look at the roots of a word.

The word assideo is the root for our word "assessment". The third definition as seen above is where we get our word. And yet, as I sit here at exam time I wonder if the first definition, "besiege" isn't really what we are doing.

One can never assess fairly because assessment is fundamentally a human activity. How do we really know how well a student understands history or literature? We can't. I know some will answer that we are really assessing a students ability to express that understanding, not if they have an understanding. This is true. But still, can one really distinguish an A- music composition from a B+ composition? The same holds true for a art project and yes, an essay. I propose to bring our assessments back to the root. Let's "sit by/in council/as assessor". Let's find ways to really bring assessment back to one of being in council with the learner. Let's move assments from being sorting exercises to learning exercises.