Bharathi Jagadeesh wrote:
>Why is it wrong to announce grades publically?
I can only speak IMHO. I don't think it's "wrong," as in "morally
wrong." What I think it does, though, is works against creating a sense of
community in the school. Rather than competing with yourself, or with an
absolute standard, the other students become your adversaries. Some people
don't mind this. I found, though, personally, that I did.
>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?
All I can say, was that no, for me, it did not. It made dread
school. It gave me stomach cramps.
Your point about athletics is interesting, though. I was also on
the swim team, and there the competition was fun, as you say, and there was
suffering in terms of hard workouts, but I don't particularly remember that
anymore, whereas I remember the suffering in academic subjects in
excruciating detail. In swimming, I wasn't particularly good either; most
of the time I came in third or thereabouts (out of 4 swimmers), but I still
remember the time I came in second and the entire swim team cheered me and
yelled "way to go, Karen!" They recognized that it was a "personal best,"
a breakthrough for me, my best time in the 100-meter breaststroke. In
retrospect, I think the difference was that, on the swim team, we were
competing against the other school, and against the clock. But we cheered
*each other* on. It was a community.
The academic classes were, for some reason, nothing like this.
>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.
I've had discussions about this very issue with my former high
school violin teacher. He is now of the opinion (which I share), that this
is not a particularly good way to deal with students in student orchestras.
Although he didn't do this (he did what you describe, here) when I was in
the orchestra 15 years ago, he says that he now rotates the students within
the sections. At least for violinists, the only instrument I have
experience with, the seats toward the back of the section are bad, you
can't see the conductor very well, and it's harder to hear the cellos
across the room. It doesn't do the weaker players, who are there to learn
to play better, any service to shove them back there away from the action
all the time. And he was finding that the students, and even more so, the
parents, were getting obsessed with where their child sat, to the detriment
of caring about the music. It took him about 7 years to realize this, so I
missed out on his change of heart. Instead, I remember the student and
parent obsessions with seating all too well. After high school, I had also
pretty much had it with violin. It just wasn't very much fun--because of
the emphasis on competition and seating.
However, when I was at Caltech, about 10 years after I had last
picked up a violin, I decided to go back to it. The scars had healed, and
I found I just kind of missed playing. I played in the Caltech orchestra,
and took lessons with a member of the L.A. Philharmonic. He said that
major orchestras (such as the LA Phil, where he was a member of the first
violin section) are also moving away from this ranked seating in favor of
rotations. Yes, there is usually one or a small number of concertmasters,
because leadership of a section is important, but the other stands are
rotated. And he said that this is pretty much becoming commonplace in
major orchestras across the country. If *professionals* are rejecting this
ranked seating, and it leads to the unpleasantness my former orchestra
leader described among students and parents, I personally can't find much
there to defend. I know I hated it.
>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.
One additional reason I think that the seating in the classroom by
test scores is a bit different than the sports ranking at meets, is that
the ranking, at a sports meet, is transient. It is there for the
afternoon, and then at practice the next day, you can set about the
business of getting better. In contrast, in the particular physics class
that I wrote about briefly in the other posting, it was especially annoying
because when you did well on a test, you had to sit in the *back* of the
room. And this lasted for a month or two, until the next test, not just an
afternoon. So every day, every class, you were reminded of how you did on
that last test.
What's more, I personally found that I disliked sitting in the back
of the room. I couldn't follow the lecture as well from back there, and so
I got special permission from the teacher to sit in the front row with all
the low-scorers. One of these guys struck up a kind of
conversation/friendship with me--his first question was "what are *you*
doing down here with us?" I thought, in a way, that was rather sad. I
didn't know this kid. He travelled in "low-scoring" circles. High scorers
and low scorers were segregated--by classes, and then within classes. He
was, as it turned out, a nice guy. And about 10 years later, I read a
write-up on him in the local newspaper. He had made a lot of money and
achieved respect in certain circles by breeding a new breed of angelfish
and selling it to pet stores--a degree of success and ingenuity not matched
by many of his "high-scoring" peers. And the only way I ever got to meet
him (it was a large school, and a large lecture, with these
ability-segregated classes), was by asking for special dispensation from
the teacher to sit with the low-scorers in the front row. I was the only
one out of several hundred students, all year, who ever did that.
So I think an additional consequence of this was to create a social
class system, based on test scores, that had far-reaching social
consequences. I think these consequences were not entirely beneficial to
the adolescent psyche, or search for identity.
Typing in the personal ads for the yearbook my senior year ($1 for
3 lines, printed in tiny type, mashed together in several pages at the back
of the yearbook; a fundraiser), I came upon the following ad, submitted by
one of the people who kind of bounced back and forth between the low- and
high-scoring castes: "To the AP people at [our school]: a person's worth
is not measured by how they score on tests. You will find that friendship,
and more importantly, love, cannot be learned from books."
Karen
