So, school starts Monday and I am once again staring at my expectations and struggling to find the courage to change around what we do. My dream is to accurately measure learning instead of playing the game of school. I find myself depressed when looking at what other people do in terms of evaluating student learning. Everything I look at has the words points in it. Don't get me wrong, points and competition are great. As a coach I crave when my players are competing at the top of their game against a worthy opponent. I am not sure how that translates to the classroom beyond some of our physics projects. How do points translate into learning? Is the standard measurement for learning points? How much learning do you have to do for a point? Can you use points with metric prefixes? Are there Megapoints, Millipoints, or even Hectopoints? I could make a case that most teachers use Hectopoints. I am even guilty of having hundreds of points in my grade book, but for what? Is it a game? Is it scientific? Can I get a point-o-meter to help me measure learning?
No matter what I have to boil a student down into a letter based on the points from the grade book. This is more baffling to me. That in turn gets internalized by the student and can shape their life based on a single letter. At least in biology there are 4 letters that determine who we are. I tell students all the time that an A or an F doesn't make you a good or bad person. I also question the blind faith that gets put into a letter. Parents look at the letter grade and if it is an A or B then their child must be doing great and learning what they should learn. If their child has an F,D or C then their child must be struggling and not learning. There is a universal thought around my school that a C makes you a bad person. That leads me to the other thing I have never understood. Most teachers curve. If we curve our grades to fit a bell curve, shouldn't the majority of students have a C? If the majority should have a C then why is C so bad? The other thing that gets me is teachers only curve up. If we take part in that practice shouldn't your ethics also make you curve down? If the average on a test was a B shouldn't you take out the easiest questions to bring that average down? The other problem I have with practice is we are basing ever thing on expected results. In a bell curve, you have half of your students with a C, D or F. That's not what I expect. Shouldn't the expected be all the students with a C or above? That is my expectation that everyone succeeds.
My other contention with grades is that an A student probably does not learn as much as some C or D students. Students who seem to struggle in physics don't come in with the same tools as A students. They often have to learn or relearn some of the math skills we use in class, where the A students already have. The typical grading system does not reward this, in fact it most definitely penalizes the student who comes in with weaker math skills. Doesn't seem right. Yet, the question I have had is how do we measure student learning? How do you put everything a student learns into a letter? How do you setup a system that is accurate? How do you do it so parents and admin isn't freaked out by your crazy system?
Now the biggest question is am I going to change it or keep it the same as it ever was? This is the toughest question I face every year. Stay tuned!!
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