PASS FAIL

Around the time I started looking at trees, squinting, and thinking That oak is a B minus, maybe a B, it became clear to me as a professor that my best laid schemes had gone so far a-gley as to be barreling towards the Canadian border (this will become relevant later. You know the rule: if you mention the Canadian border at the beginning of a story, a gun goes off in the second act. Or something.)

But there I was, teaching for the whatever-th year, apparently so torqued by the constant unspoken requirement to evaluate and assign merit (as embodied by the act of grading, which is both generally understood in academia as necessary and abhorred by most teachers as well as students) that it was increasingly difficult to remember why any of us had showed up in the first place, except that one of my colleagues kept baking perfect pound cakes from gothic castle molds and topping them with delicate snows of powdered sugar.

We, the students and teachers alike, were doggedly showing up, but it was more to queue at the “Am I Enough?” booth than to enjoy the carnival, most days. None of us really received any answers to that questions that we could really believe, to my knowledge— at least not for long (even a good grade or a solid eval can be hard to absorb and be proud of, if you’ll never be rid of the monster D or F, or the scathing student review, that hides under your bed, drooling over your slender wee ankles).

Instead of leaving the carnival with a sense of lasting validation or robust encouragement from the letters and numbers flying around the vulnerable white headers of our printed labors, we left a perpetually empty booth with neither our fortunes told nor a caramel corn to munch upon. It seems, that in our constant striving to assess each other, it’s possible to lose sight of The Work almost entirely.

[The Work, for my students, was mostly reading literature, writing their own creative and/or critical pieces, and talking with each other and me about both. For me, The Work was mostly curating readings to engage and challenge, building tasks that would strengthen and sharpen intellects and approaches to the world, and encouraging young-ish humans to become and/or stay curious, robust, and compassionate in explicit and implicit ways that could be carried beyond the last day of class.]

But the grades. The grades always got in the way. Even when things were going great, and a student was doing brilliant work, the rain would find the parade: I had a student who was deeply skilled and practiced in thinking and writing about literature, but she was so worried that she wouldn’t get an A in the course, so focused on what she’d been taught was a crucial read-out of her worth as a human being, that she was neither enjoying the course nor improving— despite having a passionate interest in the subject (which was Environmental Literature).

I finally said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you complete all the work for the rest of the course, you get an A.” She had such trouble believing I was in earnest that she bobbed up and down and checked over both shoulders. “Just finish it? That’s all?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, knowing full well, at that point in the course, that she wasn’t capable of turning in something she hadn’t poured herself into. She stumbled out with the whites of her eyes showing. It was interesting, exhilarating, and also quite sad.

During the next class, she was visibly far more relaxed, had and used a sense of humor, and helped her peers in verbal and non-verbal ways. Her papers started to include more original, exciting material. With the safety net of the “guaranteed A” underneath her, she was willing to engage fully, without hesitation. She even tried on some oddball ideas, requested that she be allowed to change some of the prompts a little to fit her particular interests and how they intersected with material from her life and other courses (yes, please, applause applause!)… and the list goes on.

But she was an exceptionally good student to begin with. What about the students who don’t want to be there, or struggle to stay, for any number of valid reasons?

Often, part of the reason they don’t want to be there or struggle to stay is that terrible looming cumulonimbus of grades. I don’t blame them: they’re being assessed so often and under so many different rubrics they become resentful, closed off, cynical, defensive. And I have to assign so many letters and numbers to so many nuanced, subjective things (yes, even with a solid rubric, it’s subjective to a tricksy degree in many disciplines) that I limp off in a daze and start grading oak trees.

Assessment can be a deeply effective tool for learning, but its centrality and punitive tenor in academia is fatiguing and ultimately often demeaning to everyone involved. Read: grading is a big bummer.

So this morning, when I read (Canadian) Professor Alexis Shotwell’s piece on what she calls the “Menu of Options” method of grading, I wanted to toss the toilet paper confetti my twins had been shredding, in a gesture of relief and celebration.

Her method as described in the above link has far more structure and thoughtfulness, but the gist is this: you can build a highly functioning, robust learning environment without the distorting pressure of traditional (“bummer”) grading methods.

Under Shotwell’s plan, students choose which grade they want, according to the “menu” of work listed under each. Then, if they complete all the listed assignments for their selected grade (with the professor officially assessing each one only as Pass/No Pass, but still providing written feedback, and with the student retaining the option to resubmit until they do pass all assignments), the student receives their chosen grade. (There’s also a reflective framework to support this series of events— short essays in which the student self-assesses, citing the menu and their completion of its elements.)

That’s a lot of reading and writing for the teacher, sure, but without the need to convert experience and lively exchange into quantitative values at every turn, an act of translation that takes folks like me a lot more energy than one might think, we may be free to …I dunno, do what we love?! —Reading, writing, responding, geeking out and doing the awkward work of growing in general. Just imagine.

And the students? I'm hoping, given a fighting chance, they find more of the respect, autonomy, and space to maneuver that’s required for meaningful, lasting learning.

*

Are you an oak tree? Have you recently been unfairly graded by a wandering literature or writing professor? What right did she have to do that to you? That’s an easy answer— none! You’re just out there being an oak tree, and then she goes and compares you to a birch, which everyone knows she has a thing for. What do you think is going to happen when you go up against an Aspen? Sheesh. Also, why are we talking about this person at all when you’ve got two types of fungus and a groundhog to worry about?

*

It all begs some questions:

—what am I assessing that I could be enjoying?

—what am I assigning value to instead of experiencing?

—what am I naming instead of encountering?

Obviously none of these pairings is mutually exclusive. But we gotta make sure we’re not serving up the packaging and dumping the corn chips in the trash. (I’m a little keyed up about wasted food lately because I ordered Chipotle for delivery through GrubHub and the driver left my dinner at someone else’s door and sent me a picture of it. Such longing should not have to be endured.)

It’s also worth noting that the course I arguably got the most out of in my entire time as a formally enrolled student was one for which I received a lower-than-usual grade, that this fact has zero bearing on my continued use of the extraordinary, transformative stuff I learned, and that I still occasionally talk to the professor, twenty years later. To take all that and call it “B-,” is to flatten, if not stifle or entirely snuff out, what matters.

So bring your grade grievance from the halls of schools past to my 5am candle altar, where I perpetually edit the novel that won’t die, and I’ll burn your regrets for you until the kids wake up. I’ll have your transcript in ashes before it’s time to unload the dishwasher.

Oh—a bonfire could also work, and would lend itself to s’mores, which is a serious consideration. Bring a chair and some layers for when the air gets chilly.

Don’t worry, it’ll be dark, but there have been stars and even meteors lately. I promise we will, all of us, learn things.