Karen Lona Allendoerfer (ka143 at columbia.edu) writes
> ending with a bio teacher who used to read
> all our grades aloud and hand back our weekly tests in reverse order of
> how we did, all the while telling us how grateful we would be when we
> got to college.
[. . .]
> His class did prepare me for
> college level work. The excitement of the material that he taught played
> a role in my deciding to major in biology.
>> And yet, even 15 years later, I have a hard time not cringing when I
> think about the grade-grubbing that he encouraged, the public posting
> and discussion of how we were all doing, and such. It was a part of
> the larger climate in the school at the time (the physics teacher
> seated us according to our grades on tests, in addition to the public
> posting), so I can't really lay it all at his feet.
In my opinon, it's not inherently wrong to pass out tests by grade or
seat students by their grades on tests (though it might be ineffective
in teaching students, something that I would consider before taking such
a strategy).
Why is it wrong to announce grades publically? When people run a race,
or pole vault, or swim the 500, the times and heights are announced
publically, and we know who came in first second and third. Why is this
wrong on a physics test? Doesn't knowing your rank inspire you to try to
be first, when you were second before, just as racing someone else
always results in faster times than racing against the clock?
Competition isn't always a bad thing, and this is universally recognized
in sports. We want to know who ran the fastest or swam the fastest, or
lifted the highest weights. Music, ranks people, too, as first second
and third chairs, and they sit according to their ranking, and there are
music competitions where competitors are scored.
These aren't just rhetorical questions, actually, I'd like to know if
people think that seating students by test scores, and ranking them by
their 200 yard dash times are different, and why. I can think of a few
reasons, that test scores aren't a measurement of anythng absolute like
the time to run a 200 yard dash, or that school is important and sports
aren't, or that trying to get the best test scores undermines learning
(the goal of school), but that trying to run the fastest time satisfies
the goal of trying to run the fastest time.
I, too, had an experience similar to the high school bio teacher, in my
case a math teacher in a all girls school. When I took his class, I was
new to the school, having just transferred from a public school, where I
had had the prior material in math, and so, was assigned to a class
where all the students were a class ahead of me. The teacher was
considered a character in the school, and everyone who had been there
any length of time knew his teaching style, which included requiring
students to stand at their desk until he yelled "SIT" and we'd all sit
down, assigning extra homework sets on the basis of class performance,
holding the class hostage to the weakest students answers of questions.
I was new, naive, and alone. I suffered.
But, I learned a lot. I learned that I could do math just as well as
anyone else, that I could do problem sets that looked too hard, that I
could think creatively, and that I was good at it. When I look back, I
remember the learning, and not the suffering. The suffering was, for me,
relatively benign and short lived, and left knowledge in its place. And,
the atmosphere of the class inspired me to rise to the challenges, so it
would not have been possible to just remove the tension, and leave the
rest of the good stuff. I like clean competition (and clean does matter
to me -- it involves rules and fairness, and I don't know precisely how
to define it).
I think that one thing that's very clear from this discussion is that
people have very different teaching and learning styles. Undoubtedly
some of the others with the same experience as me in math class remember
the suffering and not the learning. How do we reach both kinds of
learners (students who thrive on encouragement and students who thrive
on competition), I wonder?
