Grading Day
It's Grading Day here. That's sort of a misnomer, since it actually started last night and won't end until Monday.
Grading. The necessary evil. Or not, depending on one's point of view. As much as I would prefer not to have to do it, every employer I have had as a teacher has required that I submit letter grades for my students. I am also required to have a rationale for that assignment: I have to be able to prove that each student received the grade he deserved, no more and no less.
This is my "power." This is why many people hate teachers. This is what I hate to do. Grading is often antithetical to teaching. But I am still required to do it.
Let's be honest. If I do not know at the end of the semester everything that each of my students knows about my subject, then I have failed as a teacher. I know what they know and how well they know it. I can tell you exactly where they stand against the growth chart for that class. I can eyeball them and assign letter grades without testing or a final project. Except there is one pesky truth: our society rewards numbers over truth. Numerical calculation will be involved. And no matter where any cut-off for letter grades is set, students will cluster around that cut-off.
So I am spending this four-day-long Day quibbling over plusses and minuses, about a percentage or two. But that test or final project, if written correctly, tells me what I already know, 99% per cent of the time, about each and every student. I can predict their grades ahead of time with remarkable accuracy. It is rare indeed that someone has developed skills over the semester which have been successfully hidden from me. The purpose of the final is, of course, to discover those rare cases.
For the rest of you students, we know it has been one immense pain in the behind, but please remember that much of your education is about process. Valuable lessons need to be learned (like the importance of backing up the Final Project, as one of my students learned the hard way this past week. He had to do everything over again from scratch). Deadlines matter in life. We discover a lot about ourselves when we have to meet them. Here's another truism that teachers have learned: a good thesis/project is a done thesis/project.
To those of you who are students, we teachers salute you for your efforts. Please know that we take this task extremely seriously, regardless of how much we detest having to do it. And please know that you are welcome here. We are colleagues in the search for knowledge.
--Robyn Elaine Serven --Bloomfield College, NJ |