What Matters?

What’s the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of school? For most people, it has something to do with grades. Why? Because “grading” is such an integral part of what we think of as “school.” From quizzes to presentations to standardized testing, for the majority of any given student’s academic career, they will be assigned numbers to dictate their success. These numbers will help determine the student’s success of failure in the future -- it will set a precedent for how they will view themselves and how they are viewed by others for the rest of their academic career and beyond.

When you were in school, how many times did you hear people tell you just be who you are? We hear it all the time. Don’t worry about what Suzy thinks about you or No matter what he says, Tom can’t determine who you are inside. Adults seem to think that part of being a child or adolescent is determining your own self-worth based on the views of others and that you’ll just miraculously grow out of it once you become mature.

Where do you think all of this obsession is coming from? We hear stories all the time about kids who fixate obsessively on the number of facebook friends that they have or the sad truth of young girls who fixate on the numbers on the scale. Do we ever stop to think about where they learned to fixate on the numbers to tell them their worth?

From the time our kids are little, we assign them a number. This is how good you are, we say, as we pat them on the head and pretend that we’re encouraging them.

Not only has it been systematically proven time and time again that using grades as positive or negative reinforcement for motivation doesn't work, but all grade assignment is to some extent an arbitrary decision on the part of the teacher and is affected by the teacher’s perception of the student as well as his or her perception of what matters.

It has also been shown time and time again that the most effective grading for results isn't really grading at all -- it’s timely, specific, improvement oriented responses. This is the type of thing that music teachers and computer programmers do. But in the school system, not only do we include early learning experiences in the ultimate grade we assign a student, but the grade we assign often doesn't even focus on what matters.

And that’s what it all comes down to, really -- what matters. What matters is the students.  We need to give them fair and true assessments.  Our assessments and grading practices must reflect what we really need the students to know to life a wholesome life. And they simply don’t.  More than that, we have to show the students that they matter. When teachers invest in students, grades go up, ambition goes up, and teacher morale goes up. Not only that, but gang involvement goes down, violence goes down, abuse goes down, and students who are kidnapped and trafficked goes down. That’s a pretty impressive list, but we haven’t done anything with it.