Failure By Any Other Name

As a teacher, this is the time of year where I give out final exams and watch my students sweat out (not nearly as much as I’d like) their preparations for their final grade in the class.  Some students are in a pretty good position and therefore, are a bit more relaxed entering the fray.  Other students are on the border line and to whatever extent they are concerned of passing or failing, they approach the test accordingly.  Yet, one more category of student exists that trumps all of those – the senior in danger of failing.  This senior can run the gamut, from almost pathologically worried to blithely unconcerned.  Yet, for the latter, their failure and failing to see the importance of the situation is not entirely their fault.

From the early years of our education system, chances are given ad nauseam.  Last chances are given in primary and middle school – the social promotion the reader may have heard education leaders and specialists deny exists any longer.  Yet it does.  Many administrators have approached the end of the year with the best intentions.  “This year, a parent will not browbeat me into passing their kid” or “This year, I will stand firm and say that little Timmy cannot take part in sixth (or eighth grade) graduation ceremonies.”  Yet, again and again, school districts “knuckle under and crawl” to the demands of the parents who approach school officials like defense attorneys. 

Once in high school, a freshman student has been taught over the course of the last eight years that in the end, things will work out, they will pass, they will move on.  Parents are equally lulled to sleep by this expectation to the point, they barely come to the school any longer except to send one last salvo of objection and indignation at a school system that would fail his/her child.  The later in the school year it is, the greater the outrage.  It would be comical were it not done at the expense of a child’s sense of their own entitlement.  After years of being passed along by over-sympathetic, misguided or pressured teachers and administrators, the young minnow reaches the twelfth grade with visions of cap and gowns, graduation ceremonies and parties and the ultimate freedom they constantly crave but secretly fear.  The parents, by this stage, only come to the school for rewards or other recognitions of their child’s greatness.  They have put in the work to ensure that nothing trips up their student’s path to success.  Surely, no teacher would fail a student in the senior year.

Yet, they get the personal pronoun wrong and it creates the tension that characterizes the last months of school.  In my case this year, both students were given multiple opportunities to bring up their grade but they did not take advantage of this.  Both child and parent have been conditioned by the failings and lack of moral toughness of the school system.  In an effort to constantly fret over the short term, we’ve created a monster incapable of considering the long term.  A naturally egotistical and self-absorbed demographic is catered to with immediate considerations, with no thought to the long-term impact of our actions upon the student and their work ethic. 

It is the end of May and I have two seniors that will not graduate.  I look at them and it pains me to think what we have wrought.  They have been looking forward to the senior year and all the accolades that comes to a person who legitimately matriculates towards college or a career. Yet, they will not make the connection between their efforts and their results.  What will happen to those two students?  Will they understand why they failed?  The student’s parents are no longer a concern because the student is now an adult.  Yet, what tools have they been given to deal with their upcoming failure?  In the next week, I will see the anguished jeremiads of students and parents (and administrators) and the real tragedy is they are crying about the wrong thing.

What’s in a Grade?

Since the time I began teaching, I was told of the wonders of the highly motivated student – the one who constantly strives to get the best grade. This is the student that knows the most and wants to know more. This is the student that offsets the ambivalent, disengaged one who clutters up the roll sheet and drags down the class as a whole. This is the student who will go on to achieve the greatest of all of his or her peers. As a teacher, I have many students who could be classified as highly motivated. However, the extent to which I treasure these students has waned over the years.

My attitude towards these students is never personal – it is professional. However, I have taught these students for sixteen years in high school, including three years at a local community college. In that time, I’ve come to understand the danger of these students. In Matthew 6:24, it reads that, “No man can serve two masters…Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” So it is with students. One can either achieve for knowledge or achieve for an “A” but one cannot do both.

The pursuit of knowledge is compromised by the government officials that seek test scores as affirmations of success. It is undermined by the school officials who stress that all of their children are headed to college – and certainly should be. It is undermined by parents who stress a letter as the highest level of achievement of their child. It is undermined by the teacher who constantly re-affirms that the grade is the most important goal. Lastly, it is undermined by the student who places their effort to achieve a letter over their effort to better understand something.

I teach Advanced Placement World and U.S. History classes. I have the grade-mongering students who will pore over the terms for each unit in preparation for a unit exam. In the interim, they will read and I will discuss the context – the history – of which the terms are a part. When I write up a test, I pose questions based on the terms but occasionally, as an experiment, I will ask questions based on the terms within the context. Because the grade-mongers see only the terms as the path to success on the unit exam, that is all they study and they will not go beyond. Therefore, they will nail the fact-based questions using information of the terms but to talk about the terms in context, they fail and are frustrated every time. The goal is not to completely understand the information but to learn what is needed to make a passing grade. The gaps in their knowledge are even more evident when I hold conversations for a test grade. My feeling is if they can carry on a five- to ten-minute conversation with me on a particular subject, then they know the information. They seldom show such knowledge. It is not a pursuit of knowledge these kids are concerned with; it is the perversion of the pursuit of knowledge of which they are guilty.

A colleague of mine and I have given much thought to what should be in place of grades. It is not enough to say, “We are not going to hand out grades.” At the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, they have a place called the “sweat room.” It is here that students await for their time in front of a panel where they will justify their earning credit for a particular field of study. Likewise, we would like to create a school where a student earns a “passing” or “failing” grade by speaking with a panel of three teachers and having to defend their knowledge. It is much more challenging and more comprehensive a process than the current grading system. On a practical level, this type of model is not conducive to the school system in its current form. Changes would have to be made. At present, as my colleague and good friend is fond of saying, high schools today are simply tools for universities and businesses – we help them by categorizing and labeling students to their benefit.

To some extent, it is not the kids’ fault. The blame lies with the government officials, the school leaders, the teachers and the parents. We are raising a generation of people chasing success and not chasing knowledge. There are those, both in and out of education, who have boiled the pursuit of knowledge down to future occupation or wage-earnings and I can’t think of a more depressing thought. The more we come up with fancy computer programs or various initiatives to find a way to motivate our kids to embrace the cult of success, the less knowledgeable they will become. Socrates worried about the student who depended upon outside sources as a means of knowledge and complained about those who, “will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”