So why the title? Why such a negative message that so many educators would vehemently disagree with? It's unfortunately had a lot of truth though. I think the system that exists (and to my own fault, that I've continued to feed) sends a lot of students this exact message. For some students, the message is "there's no point in trying, because even if I try, I'm going to get a failing grade." For other students the message is, "there's no point in trying, because I can retake this and still get a decent grade without having to put the work in. There's always a back door, and someone's going to let me get out of doing the work." Again, I take full responsibility and need to create better routines and systems in my classroom to mitigate these mindsets, but it's just really frustrating that students get away with not giving their best effort. (Yes, students are human. I'm human, too. I don't always "give my best effort" either, because I'm human. But, there's a difference between being human and blatant slacking off. I pride myself on avoiding the latter most of the time.)
On the other hand, at least for now, I take it as the lesser of two evils, where the other evil would be punishing the students who are giving their best effort. I went down this path years ago. Lots of students probably called me an asshole. A number of students and their parents wanted me fired. To be honest, I wouldn't have been able to say I didn't deserve it if that had happened. Over that summer, I took Jo Boaler's course and it really changed my practice. My new way of doing things really improved the relationships I built with my students, and in a lot of ways it was a really positive change. But, it's had its own share of negative consequences. I really worry that a number of students are not developing the skills that they need to.
A big problem is AP in general, which I felt was worth its own post. However, I feel like there are bigger issues at hand:
1) The "Participation Trophy Generation"
Yeah, I said it. I do think Walz's rant borders on insensitive and unfairly paints a group of people with a broad brush. But, he does have a point.
I am so worried that education today is scarring our students for life. I'm not saying that I advocate or think it's okay to hurt students' feelings, but I think things have gotten too extreme. As teachers, we shouldn't be afraid to give a low grade to a student because "it might hurt their feelings and cause them to give up." Instead, we try to give students feedback, but they ignore it. "Yeah I didn't study, but since I'm going to re-take it and just learn the re-take I still get a B." Students are not going to learn that there are consequences for being late or being unprepared, and not everyone is going to baby and coddle them.
On the other hand, the expectations of "performing" being the only way to get a good grade is putting an unhealthy amount of pressure on students. We are creating a bunch of anxious people who don't think it's okay to fail sometimes. News flash: you fail every day. If you don't fail some of the time, you're not taking any risks. What a boring and unfulfilling life that would be!
I'm not advocating "sink or swim" either, but if you threw students into the pool, most would figure out how to swim. And yes, you should rescue the ones who still are not able to before they drown. What's happening, though, is students look around, see everyone being helped, and so they don't feel any need to try to swim.
2) Growth Mindset and "Rick Wormeli-ing" our grading practices.
(Preface to this paragraph: If you taught over 10 years ago and disagree with me, I would love to hear what challenges you faced back then, especially considering it's when I was in high school. I'm sure some of the challenges I face today are because of karma coming back to get me. (-: )
As far as I know, we were the first high school around us to adopt our grading practices, mainly based on Wormeli's work. Teaching was so much easier even 10 years ago when I was in high school. You could just tell students the material. There weren't all these expectations of what your lesson should look like. If students misbehaved, there were consequences. It wasn't "well, you should try to engage them more." I'm not saying students learned more or things were better back then, but I think a lot of challenges that teachers face today did not exist even a short time ago.
Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I do need to check my privilege because I remember details really well and really easily, which makes it a lot easier to get high scores on tests. I had two parents who taught me good homework habits, so by the time I was in high school I had those skills on my own. Getting good grades motivated me, so I did what I was asked.
My biggest fear is something that worked for Rick, he turned it into a book, and then it became "the telephone game." Everyone bastardized its message, morphing it into some terrible things.
And thus, this takes us back to the title of this post. "Grades should communicate the level of mastery achieved by a student rather than compliance" turned into "homework doesn't count so I don't have to do it, and you can re-do anything so there's no need to do it right the first time." Kids got the message, "if the test isn't like what I studied for, that's the teacher's fault." Or, "I don't get it. That means the teacher didn't teach it well or went too quickly through the material." "Everyone learns differently or at a different pace" turned into "I can put in as much or as little effort as I want. It's all about me. I don't have to meet anyone else's expectations." Students got the expectation that life is supposed to be fair. I am terrified to think about how students are going to deal with real adversity.
Now, there are a number of very mature and driven students who will still put their best effort in. And herein lies the biggest problem. I look at two students in specific. They mostly do everything right. I've spent hours helping them, and I know they've learned plenty about calculus this semester. But, on the final exam, they only received 35 percent of the points. That would be a 2 on the AP Exam, and no college credit. I found a way to grade the final exam so that it would not drop a lot of students' grades, but I think it also let a number of students get away with not putting in effort to prepare for the exam. I also fear it lets students get away with performing poorly. "You keep getting almost all of the problems wrong, but you tried, so here's a B." That's not right, and that was actually more of the point of adopting the grading practices that our school did. But, I stand by my decision, as I don't want to have a lot of people who are capable avoid taking the course next year because they are afraid of getting a poor grade. I just have to improve my systems.
Then, there are a number of other kids. I know they're giving a half-assed effort. I know they're not regularly doing homework. I give "homework quizzes" where I pick problems from the textbook and put them on a quiz and make it a summative grade. The point is to motivate the students to do homework regularly. I know it's wrong. I can justify it with our school's grading practices, since it's graded based on whether they can do the problems correctly or not, and I allow them to make it up by fixing it or replacing it with their exam grade. But again, it doesn't serve the purpose it's supposed to. The students who do do homework can still do poorly, if they don't remember how to do the problems that appear on the quiz, even if they did a lot of other problems correctly. I also make full solutions available to the students so that they can check their work, but I know some of them don't do the problems and just "study" for the quiz by staring at the solutions. It's a big friggin' joke. Since there are two sections, often students will tell their classmates in the later section what problems are on the quiz. I started doing two quizzes, but again, that's more work for me and probably not a valuable use of my time. Plus, it still doesn't fix the real issue.
I'm going to have students log how much time they spend on their homework, show it to me in class, and get it initialed by me. I probably should have started doing it earlier, but it's disheartening that that's a way I have to spend some of my energy and time during a class period. This, however, probably is a good way to gradually release responsibility, which is a suggestion I received on Twitter.
That's my plan to reframe this productively. I am hoping I can find a way to get the best out of my students, both in effort and in results.
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