But anyway...
So, time for Part 2 of my little rant...
I'm currently carrying a 4.0 GPA going into my senior year of college, and let me tell you, it's a lot tougher to pull that off in a university than it ever was in the public schools I grew up in. However, I've noticed a really weird phenomenon as I'm attending classes with students who have grown up in today's public school system... Let me illustrate with an example:
One of the classes I had to take last year was a class in the basics of mathematics for elementary educators. One day, the professor was passing back an exam we had all taken, and offered to explain any of the questions that we had missed. One girl's hand immediately shot into the air, and before the prof could call on her, she launched the attack: He had made a mistake in one of the questions, therefore, her answer was not incorrect at all, and she deserved credit for his mistake. With a sigh, the prof ran through the problem on the overhead... and discovered that she was in fact right, he had made a mistake in the problem. As about half of the class had given the same answer as my classmate, the professor gave an extra point to everyone... leading my classmate to begin cheering, "Yes! 100% Oh yeah, oh yeah..." Later on in the term, on a class project, this same student was infuriated to discover that she had only scored a 15 out of 25 (60%)... "But, I'm an A student! You're grading us too hard and expecting too much of us! This is just ridiculous..."
Which is what brings me to the point of this part of my rant... When we make the "A" the standard for our education system (see my previous post for more on that...), we not only discourage a sizable chunk of our student population, but we artificially puff up the kids on the other end of the spectrum... We tell them that they deserve their high grades and that their grades are an integral part of their personal worth. We give them the expectation that they will always get high grades, and that the school system will always work with them to help them maintain their high potential.
However, there are other factors at play and systems at work when it comes to "raising the standards" in our school system. Federal mandates for visible proof of student achievement (no, I'm not going to even start in on NCLB... way too much ink and way too many pixels have been spent on that whole hornet's next for me to add anything worthwhile... :-/) have led to a simplifying of skills and information so that more students will be able to grasp the fundamentals of a wide range of topics and perform more consistently on state tests. This simplifying of skills to reach the majority of students makes it easier for the already advanced students to get A's... which gives them the impression that school is always going to be easy for them because they are naturally smart.
Mixed-ability grouping continues that process, since advanced students in a class often are rewarded with extra free time in class to read, work on projects, or visit while the teacher works with students who need additional help to grasp new concepts; the "smart" kids see that their classmates are still struggling and they assume that there must be something lacking in other children because they don't "get" something as simple as adding fractions, or writing a paragraph, or reading a short story for examples of irony. And then the teachers come up with the brilliant idea of having the "fast" learners tutor the "slow" learners as a way of building community... which gives the "smart" kids the chance to demonstrate to their tutorees just how inferior they really are and how much harder their life is going to be because they have to work for something that "should" come so easily... And the chasm grows ever wider.
By the time kids reach middle school, mixed-ability groupings are discarded (which really makes one wonder about the long-term benefits of such groupings, but anyway...) and all students are tested for placement into the classes that will pretty much determine their high school careers. The kids who struggle are placed into the basic skills classes, and the kids who excel (many of whom have been excelling from the start for a wide variety of reasons) are placed into Honors classes, where they gain the foundational skills to help them in high school AP classes.
However, for a lot of these kids, Honors classes give them their first experience with struggling. All of a sudden, they're not getting the easy A's anymore, and when they start bringing home B's and C's, it shakes their self-confidence and their sense of who they are. Maybe they're not naturally smart... maybe they're just like everyone else after all.
Or maybe the class is too hard. Or maybe the teacher just hates them. After all, teachers hate smart kids, right? Because it's the smart kids who don't just buy mindlessly into whatever the teacher says, and who will stand up for the rights of all of the other kids who are being discriminated against by big, mean, evil teachers around the world... or so my daughter's middle school friends would have me believe, anyway ;-) The B's, the C's, the D's... they're all there just because the teacher didn't agree with what the student wrote. The Missing Work Notices are only because the teacher forgot to tell the class that the assignment was due the next day... and the kids who got theirs turned in on time only did so because they're the teacher's favorites and they always turn their work in early anyway. And the whole "only-giving-half-credit for late assignments" deal? "Well, if these stupid teachers would just realize that students have lives too, then they wouldn't be so picky about an extra day or two... I mean, in the big picture, who really cares if I turn it in on Friday or on Monday? The teachers should be grateful that I gave them a little extra time to enjoy their weekend before having to grade my paper... but noooooo, they only want to give me 50% so that they can feel in control! How unfair is that? I mean, I am an A student, after all..."
And then the report cards go home... and the parents hit the warpath. Some crack down on their "lazy teenagers", grounding them or confiscating the iPhones until their grades improve. Others demand to speak with the teacher and threaten to go to the District Superintendent if something isn't done to "rein in" this control freak behavior and put an immediate end to the age/gender/cultural/socio-economic discrimination. And quite often, if the grades don't rise, the students find themselves in "regular" classes the next semester, where they very quickly regain their status as "A" students and return to their happy, bubbly, "smart" selves.
For a lot of kids, this continues throughout high school; they graduate from 4 years of classes that aren't too hard with 4.0 GPAs and are accepted to the universities of their choice... where they crash headfirst into The Real World of university professors who don't really give a rat's patooty what grades they got in high school and who actually hold them accountable for studying-- on their own time-- the material assigned in class o_O Now, maybe I'm just seeing one small sliver of life on this topic... after all, I am in a major of study that has been labeled as "the nation's easiest college major", so maybe we get a LOT of these kinds of students. But still, I wonder if this isn't yet another side-effect of our current public school system :-/
What if we began grading students not on whether or not they meet the minimum requirements on assignments, but on how far beyond the minimum they choose to go? In other words, instead of giving a 100% to all students who met the baseline requirements, what if we gave 50% for meeting the minimum and then additional points for how far above and beyond they went? Granted, this wouldn't work for multiple-choice exams, but maybe we shouldn't be using multiple choice exams as our main form of assessment anyway.
What if we began expecting more of our students-- not just our strugglers-- to actually work hard to earn their grades? Honestly, the only way I see this working is if we go back to ability grouping at the elementary school level, where kids who need additional help are grouped together and given the assistance they need to catch up and kids who are advanced are either moved up a grade or given more challenging work to do so that they too can learn to work hard and achieve more. And by more challenging, I don't mean just more worksheets or longer books... I mean figuring out new ways to them to use what they already know and to move on to the next level of a subject when they are ready.
Some will say that this second change would be damaging to children's self-esteem. I would answer that by stating the obvious: children who struggle in a mixed-ability class are not blind to the fact that they are struggling, and this is also damaging to their self-esteem. It may even be more damaging, because the kids to whom they (and, sadly, their teachers and parents as well) are comparing themselves are often so far above the benchmark that even the average learners in a class feel inferior and incompetent by comparison.
But then again, this entire argument rests on the foundational assumption that students' self-esteem should be based upon their academic achievement... and maybe that's the gravest error of all in the whole system. What if we could find ways to tell all of our students that they are valuable and precious no matter what grades they get or how they score on their tests? What if we as teachers, as parents, and as friends constantly strove to reassure the kids in our lives that we love them no matter what, and that those letters at the top of the page are nothing more than a snapshot of a fragment of their lives?
The song I'm ending with here is a (relatively) old one called "Stupid Kid" from Caedmon's Call... It may take a little bit to find a YouTube video for it (no luck so far :-/), but I will add a link if I find it :-) Until then, here are the lyrics...
I think this place is swell
There’s much familiar here
I get my laundry done
And I get home-cooked meals
And when I’m feeling tired
I can turn off all the lights
Ignore the knocking on the door
Pretend I’m not alive
Daddy, it’s Saturday
And I don’t want to go outside
And mow the grass today
So, would you love me just as much
If I was just your stupid kid?
Would you love me just as much
If I was just your stupid kid?
They tell me that I’m bright
Sometimes I think they’re right
But I guess I’ll never know
‘Cause I won’t go outside
Some days it’s just so hot
And others it’s so cold
Too much exposure to the sun
Would just make me look old
Daddy, it’s Saturday
And I don’t want to go outside
And mow the grass today
So, would you love me just as much
If I was just your stupid kid?
Would you love me just as much
If I was just your stupid kid?
Well, isn’t this Saturday?
It sure feels like Saturday
So, wake me Saturday
Daddy, it’s Saturday...
And my mind wanders off
To things I’ve never seen
Are these walls higher than the cost
Of opportunity?
'Cause I’m too big for my bed
And I’ve outgrown my shoes
But my fear of leaving
Is the one thing I just can’t lose
Daddy, it’s Saturday
And I don’t want to go outside
And mow the grass today
So, would you love me just as much...
If I never got a job?
If I never left your house?
Would I be of use to you
If I never amounted to much more
Than just your stupid kid?
So, would I love me just as much
If I was just your stupid kid?
UPDATE (8/2/2011): OK, so here's a video for the song so you can all sing along... Just kidding, no singing necessary-- I figure if I can't carry a tune in a bucket, I have no right expecting anyone else to either :-D
