Tag: grades

Things I Know 265 of 365: I’ve been worrying over grades

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

– Pres. Ronald Reagan

I’ve decided, if possible, to take all of next semester’s courses pass/fail.

It was a decision I almost made when I registered this semester, but the schooly devil on my shoulder shouted pretty loudly.

I’m not failing any of my classes and I’m reading and learning more than any aggregate moment of my undergraduate career. The problem is that I’m worried about the grades in a way that makes me uncomfortable and that leaves me wondering if the learning I felt like I was doing matched the grades on my assignments.

This problem works both ways.

Earlier this week, I received a graded stats assignment (and you know how much I’m loving stats). Along with the comments from the Teaching Fellow (what Harvard calls TAs) was an A. I received an A on the assignment.

Then I got angry. I’ve been reminding myself any B I’ve received this semester was someone else’s interpretation of my learning and not a reflection of what I’d actually learned on the assignment. Most of the time, I’ve interacted with the grading TF no more than a sum of 10 minutes. Even if it’s been more, the samples of my work and thinking my graders have seen have been minimal. It’s a little like a standardized testing window.

My anger at the A rested in how quickly I was willing to accept a complimentary grade when it validated my self concept.

I can’t have it both ways. No matter my reaction, the effect is the same. Grades distract me from learning.

This is not to say, as Dave Thomer commented the other day, that I don’t respect and internalized my teachers’ critiques of my work. I’m here to study with experts and learn from them. Part of that means submitting my work for their response.

Whereas a grade hits me like a period of exclamation point marking the end of my thinking on the matter, a paper returned riddled with questions and comments begs a conversation.

I read a grade as, “We’re done here.”

I read comments as, “Say more.”

One of these is internalized as a statement of worth.

The other is read as the invitation to keep thinking and asking questions.

I’m hoping removing overall grades will cancel out some of the background noise and help me focus on my learning and my professors’ coaching of that learning.

Things I Know 131 of 365: If the thinking is good, I don’t care about citation

Old teachers never die, they just grade away.

– Unknown

Saturday, my mom graduates from her Master’s program.

Tonight, as we talked on the phone, she was checking her grades as they showed up online. She reported the points she’d earned on her assignments, and I logged in to my program’s website and looked at the points I’d earned in my last course.

We exchanged point information as badges of honor.

“I earned 388 of 390 points,” I said, “But, I lost those two points because of inconsistent APA citations.”

It’s true.

The less-than-perfect score with which I finished my last course was a result of formatting.

For a few entries on a list of works I’d referenced, I capitalized all of the first letters of the books’ titles rather than the first letter of only the first word as the American Psychological Association decrees.

In my defense, the books, themselves, had each first letter of each word capitalized.

While the Modern Language Association honors such formatting choices, the APA judges this level of capitalization as showy and ostentatious.

I remember when my score for that particular assignment came back to me with the notes from my instructor.

“The APA format of some entries need improvement.”

I was devastated.

It wasn’t for the reasons you’d think. Sure, my formatting was a bit off, but he’d scored my thinking as perfect.

In the last 30 years, I’ve had many thoughts. They’ve been varied in their depth and their breadth. Some were decent. Others were not so hot. I will admit now, not one single thought I’ve ever had has been perfect.

On that assignment and every other assignment for the course, I received perfect marks on my thinking and learning.

I began to worry I’d reached Maslow’s self-actualization, and it wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be.

There is, of course, at least one other possibility.

Given the portions of the assignment that had definite objective qualifiers, my instructor was able to give a less-than-perfect grade and feel justified in his thinking. There were standards, after all.

In the squishier, more subjective areas of the assignment where the quality of thinking, not the quality of writing or citation, was at question, leeway was abundant and doubt was given more benefit that it had earned.

I’m not saying I should have failed.

I earned an A for the course, and worked diligently for it.

My thoughts, though, were imperfect and should have been assessed as such. In some of my thinking, I was lazy. For some of my wording, I was imprecise. As each assignment unfolded, I learned such lackadaisical strategies would yield the same reward as strategies that were more detailed with both my language and my thinking.

I found the bar, sat atop it and never imagined what could be higher.

I’m working with my senior classes to help them practice their skills at close reading. Almost every day they analyze a piece of text for its linguistic, semantic, structural or cultural machinations.

It’s tough work and a skill to be refined.

As I assess their attempts, I’m tempted to give the same marks to  the “almost” answers as I would to the “exactly” answers.

I resist.

They can think more deeply.

They should think more deeply.

That will remain the skill I assess, and my standards will remain high.

If they cite their work with some strange bastardization of MLA and APA, I’ll be happy. So long as it’s thoughtful.

Things I Know 121 of 365: Parent conferences should be amazing

The institution of grading students on an A through F scale has done a horrible disservice to education. It has falsely given the impression to generations of students that the teacher or the professor has some ultimate authority over the value of their work, as if their own assessment of what they were doing was somehow secondary.

– Michael Winetsky

Teacher conferences at my high school included the teacher and my parents. As was reported back to me, my parents would travel from classroom to classroom listening and questioning as each teacher explained a semester’s worth of work and learning in about 5 minutes.

My part of the conference came once they arrived home.

“What do think Mrs. Henning-Buhr said about you?” my mother would say.

I’d fumble through an answer, and we’d move on to the next teacher.

Though I never saw them play poker, my parents would have run any table they chose.

As I explained my perceptions of a class and guessed at my teachers’ takes on our learning relationships, my parents sat in perfect stoic silence. Not once did they give so much as a raised eyebrow to indicate what I was saying was at least close to what they’d heard.

The things of which I was sure, like my grades, were of no help.

“I got an A in that class,” I would say.

“But what did the teacher have to say about your learning?” my stepfather would reply.

We would go ‘round and ‘round like this until I started talking about my actual experiences in the classroom without mention of my scores.

Grades have been on my mind this week as we wrapped up conferences at SLA. Twice each year, advisors sit down with advisory students and their parents to look over narrative report cards, discuss the previous quarters and set goals for the time ahead.

Because we have all an advisee’s narratives in one place, the conference can be about a larger picture than my parents’ 5-minute discuss-and-dash approach.

It’s not perfect.

For all of the community we’ve built and the lengths to which our students’ teachers have gone to qualify the learning for the term, we still have discussions where parents ask their kids, “Why did you get a B in Class X instead of an A?”

I hate these conversations.

I realize they come from years and years of the adults in the room being conditioned by grades, but I still hate them.

If a student was completely lost in the tall grass of algebra at the beginning of the semester, earning C’s and D’s on work, but found his way through it with support and guidance from the teacher and peers, a grade based on the mean average from the quarter is not going to denote that progress.

Depending on any number of factors, that student final grade could be a B or a C.

The dangers of grades are reflected in the conferences.

In an attempt to put more ownership of the process on the students, my co-advisor and I ask our advisees to lead their own conferences.

The look through their narratives and their report cards, take notes on what they want to highlight and then, on the day of the conference, lead us through a discussion of their learning.

Some are rockier than others, but all of them have more student input than any conferences my parents had with my teachers.

What I haven’t quite figured out is how to help students move away from a defensive posture when speaking about their grades and learning.

To a student, whether straight A’s or report card potpourri, every advisee takes on an almost apologetic tone as we wind our way through the conferences.

Often, I’ll interject.

“Learning is difficult. Meaningful learning is even more difficult. You did a lot of work in the last quarter to learn, you should be proud of yourself. I know I am.”

I’ll get a faint smile and sometimes a “Thank you,” then we’re back to defense.

Maybe I should be taking my parents’ approach, but with a minor tweak.

Maybe I should keep the narratives and the report cards from the students and start every conference with the same question, “What good things did your teachers have to say about you?”