Don't Make the Grade

A couple of days ago after dinner I asked my son how he did on his current events project.  Everyone in his Grade 4 class takes a turn at presenting a current event.  Grady took this project very seriously.  He initially researched some artifact from Nazi Germany that was in the news, but decided that the topic wasn’t appropriate for the younger Grade 3s in his class.  He then researched some news about a sasquatch and wrote a few pages on it.  Grady decided to ditch that topic too (I’m not too sure why) and he settled for the discovery of a planet made out of diamonds.  He printed out some articles, re-worded them into his own words and researched other interesting information about the planet.

When answering about the project, he nonchalantly told me he got a “B” and I didn’t press the matter.  Then earlier today I was speaking with another parent and she told me that her son got a C+.  I raised the issue of how grades are creeping into our kids’ lives, and the other parent told me how her son saw the C+ as being “good enough.”  Well, this totally set me off!  I talked about how damaging a grade can be. In this example, I noted that maybe her son will repeat the C+ on the next project, since it was “good enough.”  However, if only feedback was given, I find it difficult to believe that a child would keep such an attitude.  In a system that reports feedback for improvement, it would most likely encourage the child to improve upon any specifics mentioned.

Later this evening I found Grady’s marking rubric for his project. After reading it, it was clear that he did an excellent job and needs some work in projecting his voice when presenting.  It has great feedback and tells Grady exactly what he can work on to improve.  However, the B grade has already taken its toll.  He already sees his work as B, and not something that contains many goods and some things that require more work.  The grade serves absolutely no purpose other than to sort kids.  For Grady this is no big deal, but I can see how some kids would be negatively affected by it.  It makes me wonder how many C+ or Cs a child can get before they resort to the self-fulfilling prophecy of being “not good at math”.  I’m not suggesting that our kids should be shielded from criticism or the reality of their learning, but I fundamentally disagree with our preoccupation with summing up multitudes of factors, competencies and skills into one data point.