By Mike Shore, Secondary Representative
As you know from previous posts, my daughter is a senior and soon to graduate. So, we are doing all those events that senior parents do: awards night, scholarship night, and everything celebrating their achievements and memories of high school. This dual role as parent and teacher is coming to an end. This year, the teacher stress of end-of-year duties and responsibilities is coming with a bit more reflection. Google Photos is aware of this, and I am taking many visual walks down memory lane. It is amazing how Google just knows how to pull at your emotions. With each photo collage that it keeps making me open and watch, I find that these wise parent sayings keep bubbling up through my mind. Presently, I am looking at a birthday collage and remembering the giving and getting that happens at those memorable events and the phrase, “You get what you get and are happy with it” jumps to my lips. Well, surprise!!! I am finding this springing to my metaphorical lips as I answer the barrage of student emails pleading for extra credit and anything else that could raise their grade before Monica from Alma locks it away for the 2024 academic year.
We teachers have our end-of-year responses at the ready. We know what is coming, and it always does. Do any of these resonate with you?
“How can I give extra credit when you have not done the required work for credit?”
“I don’t give you a grade, you earn a grade.”
“I am sorry that you are not happy with your final grade, but it is what it is. I can’t change what Alma has calculated.”
Whatever your response, it seems to me that it dissolves into: the student has brought this upon themselves, and I am trying to absolve myself from their situation while the student is trying to do the complete opposite. After all, I am the person anointed with the power to change that C to a B with the click of a computer mouse. As a last-ditch effort to rescue myself I state, “You earned this grade.” All while the student responds, “You gave me this grade.” So, which is it?
I believe that this is a result of the system in which both the student and teacher find themselves. There is certainly a power inequity that is created by the grading system which we must operate within. We at Exeter are still well intrenched in the 100 scale. When we grade, everything becomes a number, and I find myself constantly struggling with identifying whether that is one point or half a point off, realizing that this translates into 2.5 versus 5 when scaled to the 100 points. I am trying to equate a misconception to a point value. Upon reflection this does seem strange. As teachers, we are evaluating and attaching a point value to a student’s work. We are using the tools given to make a judgment call on what a student has created. We give our response to the student in a format that enables us to record, accumulate, average, tabulate, and calculate to come up with a number that represents this student’s creative mental process. Then we put this number with other numbers from other subjects onto a report card. What does it really represent? Does an 82 in English mean the same as an 82 in math, world cultures, or science? To compound this, leading us more into the absurd, my daughter walked across the stage to get a pin for having a grade point average above a 3.5, while others walked across for getting a 3.0 a bit later. Her whole high school career is summed up by two digits! All those nights of math at the table working on factoring or late nights listening to another revision of a response for To Kill a Mockingbird or struggling to make heads of a chemistry lab result, down to a number. Oops, my bad, a 3.654 captures all this – Olivia’s high school experience is recorded as four digits. Talk about an existential crisis! What is the meaning here?
Unfortunately, I am a contributor to this educational meaninglessness. By my “evaluating” and forced method of reporting a number, I have digitized this student who is now standing in front of me. This digitized student is asking me to re-digitize them, and all I can say is “You get what you get, and you are happy with it!” After all, YOU earned those digits!
It is a trail to find the meaning; is there any? – Michael Kafka Shore, lost wandering the halls looking for a way out into the sun of summer.
NHTM Mathesis 