Here’s a bit from Ernie’s 3-D Pancakes.

It’s a comment on this article.

     Right off the bat, the columnist looses me when she compares teaching to housekeeping.  Now, I’m a homemaker, so I do consider what I do to be a vocation…a labor of love.  Something I feel called to do for my loved ones.  Something I feel makes the lives of those around me richer and better than they otherwise would be.

     But teaching is a noble vocation, and demeaning it by comparing it to cleaning toilets is just wrong.  I admit this is an emotional reaction, not a rational one…but there you go.

     For one thing, I don’t think that we have enough respect for the human dignity and important service of the people who clean our toilets in the first place, so comparing teachers to them is a double slam.

     Secondly, the columnist commits the mistake of comparing the student/teacher relationship with a consumer/vendor or boss/employee relationship.  That is not historically accurate.  It is a modern characterization that is admittedly in conflict with the academic tradition, but I think it is a mistake to ask academic tradition to change to meet this modern idea of the teacher as a servant of the student. 

     I think this because this idea is based on flawed thinking.  Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that the sole value of education was practicality.  We started asking ourselves “When is the student ever going to have to compute pi?”  We stopped viewing education as a process for training the mind, and started thinking of education as a process for creating economically useful human widgets to plug into the machinery of society.

     Now, I know that substantial training of the mind also goes on in public schools to this day.  Many, I would even say most, teachers continue to pursue their vocation tirelessly and valiantly in the face of increasing public apathy…or even hostility to “intellectual elitism”.

     But the public and social value of the trained and disciplined mind is a waning ideal, and this article is an example of that.  While it is true that we alone are the best judges of our own values and thoughts and traditions, there ARE objective measures to learning and standards of achievement.  Each has its place.

     It is the prerogative of a student who, say, has a history of math anxiety and underachievement to put forth tremendous effort, and make tremendous progress, and decide that they feel good about that “C” they received.  It is not, however, their prerogative to decide that they put forth an “A” effort, and that the volume of knowledge they acquired relative to what they began with merits an “A”.

     There is a certain measure of what a student is expected to learn, and no matter how far you have to go to make that mark…your grade reflects how close you are to hitting that mark…not how far you’ve come, not how hard you worked, not how smart and talented you are.  It is no more a judgment than a “you are here” mark on a map showing where you are relative to your destination…it is no more a permanent value than a snapshot taken at any given point in your life.

     That our society translates that into direct job fitness and pay-grade determination is unfortunate.  So you had to take Differential Equations three times before you got your “A” or “B”…you got it in the end, right?  I guess I think that’s what counts…and I think it’s unfortunate that people think we need to change the grading system rather than change our perceptions about grades.

     The competitiveness of our society has made perfection the new standard.  Anything less than an “A” is a blot for anyone hoping to make anything of themselves, and anything under a “B” is a disaster.

     And this has lead to a certain narrowing of our perspective on learning and achievement.  We realize that “A’s” are all important, we realize that more and more students are getting “As”, and  the cost of not getting straight “As” has magnified, and therefore the pressure for grade inflation, or grade devaluation has increased.  This has lead to a backlash of antipathy for “lowering academic standards”, and a call to turn up the pressure cooker on students and student achievement…which I think is wrong because over-all, a student has to do MORE to earn an “A” now days than what I had to do decades ago.

     I think the answer lies more in the direction of a more complicated view of people, society, learning, and achievement.

     Let’s take a step forward and focus down on a specific case for just a moment.  I know a guy who went through grade school, junior high, high school and college with a somewhat spotty academic record.

     He was smart and somewhat hard-working, but he was driven by interests in different directions than his course of study wanted him to go.  So he worked very hard on his areas of interest, and where they overlapped with academic standards he did very well, and where they didn’t he did sufficiently well, but did not distinguish himself.  We’re talking no “Ds” or “Fs” here…but more than a few of “Cs”.

     When he graduated, he applied to a variety of places, but most of the really good companies in his field turned up their noses at his academic record.  One in particular, would only take people with spotless academic records.

     Years later, he is considered to be quite brilliant, and one of the top people in his field.  The company that would not look at him has since tried numerous times to recruit him.

     In the end, it was not he nor his teachers that suffered from his academic record, but all of the potential employers who inappropriately interpreted the grades and what they said about a young man who would have been better represented if they had given more weight to the letters of recommendation given by his employers and professors, or by viewing samples of his work…or even if they had given him an interview.

     I’m not suggesting any particular course of action here…but instead am merely reflecting that it is our society’s own over-emphasis on grades, our own fault of attributing to them values that they are not capable of representing, that has brought grades into question.

     Grades should do nothing more than reflect how close a student has come to mastering the material in a given subject at a particular time.  If we simply must use grades to weed out a certain percentage of resumes to get them down to a manageable number, couldn’t we take a more complex view of them?

     I mean, we can “profile” someone’s age, race, neighborhood and credit card purchasing history to send them carefully selected junk mail that we think might hook them in…can’t we come up with some way of discerning with some degree of accuracy how dedicated, hard-working, creative, they are?

     OK, I know, that’s a little nutty, and a little scary.  But is it really that much crazier than the current mess, where students have come to see so little correlation between their work, their achievement, their grades and their ultimate success in life that they can seriously, and with a straight face challenge the rights of their Professors to give them grades at all?

     So, in case I lost you in my rambling way, what I’m saying is that we are not damaging grades by making them too hard to get, or too easy to get.  We are damaging grades by trying to make them represent something that they cannot possibly be made to represent.  Also, that we are not damaging education by making it too easy or too hard, but instead by limiting the scope of its perceived value and role; we are focusing on its use as an economic tool, and neglecting its role in creating disciplined, vigorous, questing minds.  Finally, we are not hurting teachers by holding them too accountable, or not accountable enough, but we are hurting them by treating them as employees and servants of the students instead of as professionals serving a vocation where their first duty is the preservation, development and dissemination of knowledge.