With my seniors.
Grading students was, is, and always will be controversial. It was when I was teaching, and so it has remained in the six years since I retired.
In my thirty-four tenure at South a class’s grades never conformed to a bell curve with most students clustered around C. A proper Bell Curve requires heterogeneous groupings. Newton’s classes, however, were sorted into three levels: Honors, Curriculum 1, and Curriculum 2. Thus, the average grade at each level hovered between B- and B. In any event, I never sculpted grades to conform to any model. If by the luck of the draw one section of mine was filled with overachievers and another with underachievers, “So be it” was my creed: students should receive the grade they earned
What did a grade in my classes mean? I conceived of it as a form of communication, a way to tell students how they had done on a particular project or were doing overall. Central to such an approach was a sense of fairness. If I assigned an essay or gave a grammar test on which most students performed poorly, then I blamed myself; clearly, either I had not worked well enough with my class for them to master the unit, or my assignment hadn’t allowed them to display what they knew. I never understood, for example, teachers content with assignments whose highest grade was a 60. The teachers justified the results by scaling the grades so that the As, Bs, Cs, and so forth distributed themselves “properly.” I’d have considered such scores a disaster and a prelude to reviewing the unit.
Writing presented the biggest challenge to my students. To be honest, over time fewer and fewer of them had done enough reading in their lives, let alone writing, to intuit and develop a sense of their own style. To help them along, I frequently met individually with students during tutorial blocks to review their writing. Grades alone, even if accompanied by extensive comments, usually still left students scratching their heads. I also required students, before they met with me, to attempt to correct the stylistic mistakes I had pointed out. That gave us something concrete to talk about beyond content, and also underscored what students still didn’t grasp, e.g. parallel structure or dangling modifiers or use of conjunctions. On occasion, usually once or twice a term, students could submit a rewritten paper for a second grade, not a replacement grade. That way students took both graded drafts seriously.
Finally, the term grade had a mathematical basis, being a weighted average of reading quizzes, writing, vocabulary and grammar tests, speeches, or other activities that period. Hence, students knew their strengths and weaknesses and could focus their efforts accordingly.
I should add one final point. Despite all of this assessing, I attempted to keep the class’s focus on what we were studying, not what grades they were receiving. In Newton, of course, some parents and students are obsessed with grades. But much of my class time consisted of activities free of measured student performance. We often discussed poetry and prose, and sometimes students themselves led discussion. I hoped that when students remembered my course, they recalled the novels, the discussions, the poems, their classmates, even the songs we sang (I brought my guitar and song sheets to celebrate holidays) rather than the grade they received.
Bob you sound like you were a phenomenal teacher. Having a grading system that has meaning but also applying a level fairness. Holding yourself accountable if all students didn’t do well on an assessment and realizing it was more a reflection of you than the students. It all shows a level of caring. The end goal is for the students to learn which means feedback so what they know is validated and what they don’t can be worked on. Sometimes revisiting an assignment were the original result was not successful teaches us the best lessons. Grades should be a meaningful but fair.
There are plenty of reasons for evaluations whose average is e.g., a 60. I can think of three off the top of my head:
1) It could be, as Mr. Jampol, states, poor calibration on the part of the instructor. In such cases, as I have told my students, “The mean is my problem. The standard deviation is your concern.” For those reading this who are confused by standard deviation, Wikipedia would be a decent place to start.
2) It could be a message to the students indicating that, on average, they are not performing up to snuff.
3) Such assignments allow those who are truly exceptional to shine as they so deserve. An 90 on an exam whose average was 60 means a lot more than a 95 on an exam whose average was 90.
How disappointing it is that in 25 years, Mr. Jampol could only conceive of the first part of the first of these three. I guess we can all be consoled by the nobility of his pedagogy with its high minded focus on poetry and literature rather than the coarseness of grades and evaluations. I must have missed the ivory tower housing the English department last time I dropped one of my kids at Newton South.
Bob, it sounds like you had a deliberate system of grading that was clear to students. Prior to the only A or B grading system (and even during it to a lesser extent), my student and her friends often commented on the inconsistency in grading practices from teacher to teacher. You could grade a paper as an A and the a different teacher could grade it as a C.
A lot of heartache, all in the name of deciding which 10% get a shot at trying to be 1-percenters, and which 10% don’t even have the right to go to college.
So grading gets homogenized and everybody ends up going to BC for their undergrad degree. Why is that so problematic? Sounds like a path toward greater societal equality to me.
While in college, we had a visiting professor from Cambridge (UK) who started the semester with a economics lecture most of us couldn’t understand. A classmate finally had the nerve to say, “Don’t you think you’re going a bit too fast?” The professor sighed and said, “I had expected so much more from MIT students.”
It was the hardest course I ever took, and I was pleased to get a 65 on the final exam.
But it’s not necessarily the kind of pedagogical approach we’d want to employ to inspire joy in a high school classroom! I think I’d rather have Bob Jampol as a teacher at that age.
As a high school special educator and humanities teacher in a so-called “high performing” district, I believe our primary goal is to teach skills and assess development towards mastery of those skills. Most teachers I know detest grading, but can accept it as a useful tool to measure one’s effectiveness in teaching as well as student mastery. Rather than a grade-scale which encourages attainment of some artificial sense of superiority over others, as advocated by Elmo, I favor a rubric which runs Beginning-Developing-Proficient-Exemplary with regard to a specific skill. Furthermore, I wholeheartedly endorse Mr. Jampol’s belief that part of what makes a teacher successful is to engender additional interest and inquiry in (and maybe even love for) the subject. And I truly bemoan the unfortunate fact that there are those who are truly of the mind that because their children receive higher grades, they are inherently superior to those who don’t.
@Elmo – Bob wrote:
“I never understood, for example, teachers content with assignments whose highest grade was a 60.” (emphasis mine)
He said HIGHEST grade, not the AVERAGE grade. So your reasons 2 and 3 are irrelevant. No ivory towers needed, but reading is fundamental.