Wk 1 Response

Comments from Christen Kauffman

I am a first year teacher. Well, actually, I am less than that; more like a half year teacher. I have only been teaching since January. Education was not my chosen profession and I did not study it in college. In fact, I landed in this job at one of the best schools in the area pretty much on chance. I knew I was going to have to fight hard to keep my head above the water and not go down in glorious flames in the six months between January and June. In the last five months a few things have happened. One, I realized that I know very little about the middle school student’s mind. Two, I am just as much a student as they are. Three, I love education and I never want to leave. And finally, four, I hate grades! I hate grading papers, I hate assigning grades, I hate putting them in the computer, I generally hate everything about them. However our educational society (and society in general) dictates that we must have them as they define our standards.

I thought my general loathsome feelings towards grades might just be the newbie in me, but after reading, “Giving an A,” (chapter three), I feel like I might not be so alone in my general disagreement with grades. Ben Zander says this about grades,

“Not just in this case, but in most cases, grades say little about the work done. When you reflect to a student that he has misconstrued a concept or has taken a false step in a math problem, you are indicating something real about his performance. But when you give him a B+, you are saying nothing at all about his mastery of the material, you are only matching him up against other students.”

So much more eloquently than I could ever put it, this sums up my feelings towards grades. Here in Florida we have the FCAT and attached to that big, fun, bundle of joy test we have lots of little ones throughout the year. One of these is our progress monitoring sets. Three times a year students write an FCAT essay and we score them on a scale of one through six. Yes the point of this is to see if the student has made progress, the only problem is that the student lives in the present. All they care about, (again because society has taught them to live like this) is what the grade is that they just got. It can be so frustrating to watch a student try so hard, and achieve at a new level never reached before, but according to the grading scale they only achieved a level two.

As they also mention in the chapter it is hard to just eliminate grades at all because all too often the grade is the driving force and not the thirst for betterment in life or education. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to teach a class that actually wants to learn instead of just getting the grade? Am I wishing too big? I don’t think I am, because I see that glimmer in some of my students. It is in the ones who write nine paragraphs instead of five because that I had too many thoughts in their head to stop. Or the student who writes a three-page free verse poem because the constraints of a Haiku are too much. So my question is, how do we get them to stop caring about grades, and to start caring about themselves?

Response:

Christen, I too remember that quote from this weeks reading. I thought about the days when I was in school and well am right now. Maybe not much back then but now I am all about my grades. I find myself stuck between doing my best and learning to I have to get an A. In teaching Kindergarten we do not have letter grades and I am thankful because like the reading stated grades to not show mastery.