CPR, PE, and teaching writing

A while back I made the following comment on one of Irv Peckham's blog posts:
One analogy I have used in trying to explain my view of grading is to say I teach PE, not CPR.
In CPR, one wants everyone to learn the same set of steps, and to be able to execute them correctly. What the learners know and can do when they arrive is far less important than what they know and can do when they leave; people arrive at the Red Cross class with highly differing abilities and backgrounds, but (ideally) leave with the same life-saving abilities.

In PE, one wants learners to acquire habits of action, and to feel the value of those habits, and to internalize those habits and carry them into life beyond the class. The goal is not for all learners to leave with the same set of abilities, but for each to grow stronger, more flexible, more self-aware than she was at the start of the class. What this means will be different for each learner, since each comes in with different experiences and abilities.

In CPR, if a student can pass the test, the student doesn't need the class. 
In PE, if a student can do 100 push-ups and run a six minute mile, the teacher does not say, "This student is fit, and can stop improving." They say, "Where can this student go from here, and how can I help her get there?"

The connections to grading are, I assume, obvious to readers here.
Teaching CPR is a lot easier than teaching PE in some ways. For one thing, there are right and wrong answers, which makes assessment a snap. For another, students are mostly conditioned to see school as a massive collection of CPR-like classes. How do I do this right? What's the right number of sources? What is the right kind of argument to use in All Academic Writing?

Sometimes a focus on rightness is completely appropriate. As Orhan (whose BS and MS are in mechanical engineering) points out, when it comes to things like bridges, there are wrong and right ways to build.

But texts are not bridges. Writing is not engineering. Writing is about meaning-making, and meaning-making practices vary from situation to situation. Teaching writing means teaching people to recognize what is needed in a given situation with a given audience or audiences and then to choose the most appropriate (not right) textual strategies to meet their goals.



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