In the year of remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic, I had to put my reading quizzes online, and the easiest way to do that was in multiple choice quizzes delivered by our campus Learning Management System.

It was awful.

I kept them light and always included a silly, obviously joking answer to make people laugh, because my secret ingredient is always laughter.

But when we went back to campus, students wanted to keep the quizzes, and I acquiesced for that first, weird, hybrid term. Now we’re back to in-person classes and hand-written quizzes, and you can have them when you pry them from my cold, retired hands.

Here are the reasons I will keep them as long as I can:

1. These short, objective quizzes over their reading assignments help me learn students’ names faster in the first weeks, when I have to hand them back every day.
2. They show me what students remember about the text they read—sometimes they don’t remember exactly what I’m asking for, but if they remember the scene and give me some relevant details, I can give them half credit, and I learn what passages were tricky to understand. With a bubble quiz, you either click the right bubble or you don’t.
3. They are hand-written. That means I get to know their handwriting, which is sometimes useful. I also learn whether they are they type of person to use a new, pristine sheet of paper each time, whether they use grid paper or sketchbook paper or write with glitter gel pens, whether they tear off the “schniblins” from the edge of their spiral bound paper, whether they will try to fit the whole semester’s quizzes on to one half sheet of notebook paper.
4. They give me the chance to say “hello” to students who don’t say much, as I pass out the previous day’s quizzes, and to comment on a cool travel mug or a haircut. They also provide space for messages—to thank me for the occasional free quiz, to ask if they’re feeling better after missing a class due to illness, to comment on how well they’re doing or suggest they consider a minor in English. Discussions go further faster the better we know each other.
5. Sometimes people answer quiz questions with an illustration. Once they do, and I color what they drew, they know (and tell others) that I will color whatever they draw. It’s true. If you draw a smiley because you can’t remember how to spell something, or if you doodle a border as you’re waiting for the quiz to start, I’ll color it in. I’ll start with the color I’m grading with, but pretty much everywhere I grade, I have access to several colors. So I color. I once had a student who spent the minutes before class illustrating a scene or two from the text across the bottom of his quiz. Every day. I asked him for some at the end of the term, and he gave me the whole stack he had tucked in the back of his binder. I still have them.
6. And then I also use these quizzes as a springboard for the day’s discussion. If students want to haggle over a question they deem tricky or if they genuinely didn’t understand some of what they read, that’s where we start. Because their reading of these texts is what we’re all here for. I’ve read them.

So in the post-pandemic days, some students are trying to get away with no paper: no books, no notebook paper. They’re reading online, taking notes electronically, and they don’t see any reason to carry paper and pencil. (These are still in the minority, but they’re loud. 😊) To those students I explain that paper and pen are required materials for my class, just as a lab coat and goggles are for a chemistry lab.

These quizzes are a multi-function assessment tool, and for me, nothing we developed during our online learning crush comes close to delivering all these benefits. And when the cloud crashes and everyone’s Canvas shell disappears, I’ll still have my little stack of index cards with quiz questions. Right next to my butter churn.