NON SCHOLA SED VITA DECIMOS*

      Grades and grading are for me a pest invested with the potential to do some good and great damage. This is my opinion as an adult. As a child, I have very few memories of being graded in school. I think that is because they never meant very much to me in of as themselves. My grades all the way through college are a motley collection of "A's" and "F's". If a teacher or a subject caught my interest, I was like a person on fire. If uninterested, I would stare indifferently into the teacher's hostile glare without blinking an eye. Perhaps this is why I have such problems with so many of my students who are obsessed with their grades and want to argue with me over every single point. Such an argument can drive me to distraction like few others can.

      By the time I was a senior in college, if I were happy with a paper and thought it fine I could care less past a certain point what grade my professor slapped on it. To look at the unimportant details and minor logical flaws in a term paper and to grade it on a rubric is to have the humor of a scholar, and I mean that in a negative way. Yet as a teacher now, I find myself going in the same direction in trying to be "objective" and have "standards." But I still grade writing at least 50% by gut reaction, although standards are nice to be able to fall back on. If I want to violate my "standards" and throw out the rubric, I hold that as my right. I hold this not as my right as a teacher, but my right as a lover of good writing which speaks to the heart.

      If I had my way, there would be no grades. What was Petrarch's or Machiavelli's or Cicero's grade point averages (G.P.A.) in their educations? Did Milton or J.S. Mill, fluent in Latin and Greek before they even hit the zenith of adolescence, busy themselves with earning diplomas and advanced degrees? Did a person leave Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum with anything other than hopefully a modicum of knowledge and wisdom lodged between their ears? The two writers I admire most from this century, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, were not stellar students. Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford University his freshman year to become a writer; Hemingway ran off to World War I at 18 years of age and learned the craft of writing as a newspaperman; neither graduated from college, but both won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They did not stress over final exams, letters of recommendations, graduating with honors, impressing their instructors. They had more important goals. So many kids today base their self-esteem on their grade point averages! Having failed to study for a test or having had a sub-par performance, I have seen students garner a "C" on an exam and then start crying. I did not become a teacher to make twelve-year old girls cry. Oh, what a swampy morass of troubles and liabilities is this beast of grades!

      I know, I know... how can we hold students accountable for their work without grades? How do they measure up against their peers? Who should we let into the university and not? Children sometimes just need to be told to do something which is good for them that they might not enjoy at the time. Grades can also be an effective way to motivate teenagers who otherwise do not care about the intrinsic value of learning; legion are the polite and industrious young persons who find pleasure and support all throughout their youth in having their superior work and behavior rewarded in excellent marks. I have also seen many students perform tolerably only because they had been materially bribed by their parents to achieve a certain G.P.A. And I have seen students who by jumping assiduously through hoops and barrels earned high grades but learned nothing of consequence which will stay with them over time. That is not learning. Young people all over the world study and sweat and stress to pass tests so they can go on to further levels of schooling and a more affluent and supposedly successful life. But I was never one of them, and this perhaps has much to do with why I find this aspect of being a teacher so difficult and frustrating. Yet if grades are so problematic, that does not mean they are unimportant. This job - the profession of teaching flesh and blood teenagers each with their own unique individual story in a real life classroom - has taught me that much. But how dispiriting.

      Non schola sed vita decimos!