Grades: Grating and Degrading

I spent some time at school yesterday critiquing a thesis draft, and afterward found myself reflecting on the difference between this experience and my years of grading papers as a high school teacher. (For those unfamiliar with the process, diploma candidates at Alpine Valley prepare a series of written and oral presentations defending the thesis that they've taken responsibility for preparing themselves to be effective adults.)

Many times in those long-ago AP history classes, I truly enjoyed the process of editing student papers: pointing out rough spots in style and argument, suggesting ways the written product could be made more effective. The volume of grading was another matter, but this was a time in my life when I was discovering my passion for editing. Although I didn't fully appreciate that at the time, it must have been so: after all, how many people could derive pleasure from reading multiple copies of the same essays, year after year?

However, whenever I finished editing a paper, I then had the painful and ridiculous task of assigning a grade to it -- a percentage and letter grade that supposedly reflected an objective assessment of its quality. I found it consistently maddening, as this process often took as much time as the editing itself, wrestling with such questions as "Is this a 4-12 or a 4-11? An A- or a B+?" I could, if pressed, arrange the papers from a given class in rough order of quality (which was pretty much all grading amounted to), but what did that tell me -- and more importantly, of what value was it to the students? This simply took time away from the part that mattered, where I was actually teaching people how to construct effective written arguments.

Yet because I always had more papers to grade, I couldn't spend too much time in those years questioning the relevance and usefulness of what I was doing. Throughout my career at AVS, on the other hand, I've had the privilege of focusing on what really matters, passing along those bits of what I know that may be of use to students. I can give them more of my time, and more of myself. And it matters because my input is, in these instances, sought out rather than imposed; because these students requesting my feedback are pursuing things that matter to them, rather than following my agenda for them.

So it's a win-win situation: students get the instruction and perspective they need (not to mention more personal attention than they're likely to find in large classrooms), and I work with people who want to learn what I'm teaching. Letter grades are exposed for the shallow game they are, as students instead concentrate on learning the nuances of subjects and refining their skills, rather than stressing out over letter grades.

Finally, individual students' passions and my own can work together, instead of being hindered by superficial gold stars that only obscure the learning process. By de-grading instruction, a degrading process is transcended for all.