Degrading Students

Today we discussed St. Augustine's perspective on motivation, pondered the appropriateness of using the word "fail", worked on promoting active learning in our classroom instruction, and discussed the validity of grading. It sounds like these topics are disjoint, but they all revolve around one central idea. I'll give you a hint, its the first thing that comes to mind when any student thinks about school: grades.

I will be blunt. I don't like grades. I think they are a fabricated label for sorting and ranking students and provide little benefit compared to the great deal of harm they do.  Receiving an 'A' is more or less the same as getting a 'Great Job!' on a paper. It means you did well, but there is no explanation why. Isn't it better to replace the 'A' with "You did a good job of stating your claim, alluding to your supporting evidence, and meticulously tying the details of the evidence to your original claim. You then succintly tied everything together in a coherent closing that emphasized the meaning of your original claim. Well done?" Likewise, wouldn't it be better to replace a 'C' with "It is clear that you know a lot about the topic you decided to write about, however your argument structure is a bit faulty. If you want to make the point that you articulate in your introduction it is important to lay out the facts that support your case. Most importantly, to pursuade the reader you need to stitch those facts together into a narrative that leads them to no other conclusion but the point you stated so clearly at the beginning.?" Because I have argued for feedback over grading before I know you are thinking "sure, but why not both?" Well, spoiler alert: imma tell you.

Lets go back to my original paragraph and look at each of the four things we hit today, which I claim all have to do with grades and why they are a terrible invention. As a reminder, the four topics were:

1) Augustine's thoughts on motivation

2) Whether or not its appropriate to tell students its ok to "fail"

3) Promoting active learning

4) Validity of grading

First, let's remind ourselves about some of Augustine's insights into motivation. You may recall that when it came to his most important student, his son Adeodatus, his emphasis was to learn things for their own sake, to seek questions rather than answers, and for learning to culminate in the joy of understanding. I get the impression that Augustine would not have found much use for a scantron in working with his son. However, you may be thinking that Adeodatus's joy at learning could be similar to that feeling of accomplishment or pride you feel when you receive an 'A' on an assignment. I'll agree, it is a nice feeling but it is fleating, especially when you get the grade on a first period test and have 6 more classes during the day. More importantly, it can be easily replaced with genuine praise with feedback embedded into it, like the examples I gave above. MOST importantly, Augustine would not have approved of such a meaningless reward of knowledge. It goes against his philosophy of learning for its own sake. In fact, he warns us about using such simple forms of praise to encourage good behavior when he said to "test those things which are done in a praiseworthy manner lest they be spoiled by the desire for praise itself." (Letter 118, 3, 22). When asking ourselves WWSAD, it seems quite obvious that reducing student work and development down to a single letter would not appear on the list. He shunned frivolous external motivations and there is no better example of such than grades in school.

It should be obvious that our discussion of the word "fail" is related to grading, but let me make it as clear as possible. The word "fail" in "school" has a definition. It means a grade under a certain percentage, 66 for example. The word "fail" in "learning" has a different definition: "not learning." How is it that a student can learn in school, yet still fail? More importantly (and I can assure you this happens too) how can a student not fail in school yet fail to learn anything meaningful? Both have a simple answer: when we reduce our evaluation of learning to numbers and letters we lose the big picture. Instead of worrying about learning students worry about not failing school (or getting a good grade), which can be done without actually learning. It is here that we see the true purpose of grades: ranking. The problem here is we rank based on what students know at the end of a class, not what they learned. For instance, a natural spanish speaker can take Spanish I and get an 'A' without learning a thing while others students can learn a great amount of spanish but end up with a lower ranking. Does that seem right? Colleges use grades to determine if students will be successful in higher education, but to that avail should we be ranking knowledge or ability to gain knowledge? I'd argue for the latter if I had to take a position, but my real feeling is that educators should be primarily concerned with education, not with sorting and grouping students so that colleges can select who they want the most. The moment we make college acceptence a higher priority than college preparation is the day that we have to change our name. I'd say we are "failing" our students if we grade them based on the standards of "Malvern Accept" instead of educate them according to the mission of "Malvern Prep."

Active learning is synonomous with "Student Centered Learning" and basically means to put learning in the hands of the students and harness their own curiosity and motivation to push their learning forward. We read four different pieces regarding active learning from journal articles to blog posts and not one mentioned grades. This is not a coincidence, grades are antithetical to student centered learning! Suppose you put a problem in a student's hands and they run with it. They learn all kinds of things in your content area as well as others. In fact they change some of their life's perspectives and decide the plans they originally had laid out are all wrong. They make leaps and bounds in their development of maturity and spill their guts to you about the revelation they have had. If you look them in the eye and blurt out "You get an A" then you should not be a teacher. This is the absolute pinnacle of education and it is demeaning to a student to reduce the experience down to a grade. I know you are thinking "sure, but you can say all the things you should say in addition to giving the grade" but by adding that label onto such an important experience it cheapens it. We don't give grades at MECO. We don't grade performances in theater. We don't grade an atheletic performance. We don't grade christian service. We recognize that all of these learning experiences are valuable in their own right and that a grade is out of place. Why then do we invest time, effort, resources, anxiety, ink, and bytes of data storing meaningless labels for meaningful experiences?

OK, time to rein it in. In fact, its about time that I was honest. If you were willing to read all of this I owe owe you at the very least my sincerity. I lied. When I said "I don't like grades" I was misrepresenting my feelings. In truth, I abhor grades. Lest you think its is because I have had bad experiences with them, I have generally received good grades and enjoyed the sweet and short rush of seeing an 'A' on a paper. But now as a mature adult I realize I wasted much of my education worrying about grades rather than receiving and listening to feedback. I don't blame myself. As a 15 year old I knew little about education, who was I to tell teachers "hold the grade, just tell me what my weaknesses are so that I can reflect upon them and improve myself?" Fortunately, now I am the educator and I do know better. In fact, so did Augustine. Our job is to educate, not to evaluate. We should be worried about motivating self motivation, not labeling it. The sooner we realize that grades are a relic of the 19th century that we should discard, the better.