There's a Word for That!

I just attended an hour-long seminar on student-centered teaching at my university. It was actually pretty good -- good enough to replace a little of my cynicism with optimism, because I found that some of my colleagues not only care about their students learning, but are really thinking and working hard to figure out how to help them learn. So it was good.

Then, as I was getting up to leave, I heard a colleague say, "I disagree with him [the presenter] about grades. No matter how much a student knows, an 'A' means 'exceptional,' so you can't have everyone getting A's." This is the MIB version of grading -- you're looking for the best of the best of the best (sir!). In other words, grades must, above all else, accomplish a sorting of students -- ideally, based on what they've learned, but a sorting there must be.

And certainly a lot of the system works that way. We are sorted into piles for entrance to graduate schools, professional schools, jobs, and so forth. But I've never been comfortable with doing the sorting as part of my teaching. I always thought, and still think, that my job is to help students learn, and not to sort them. I actually feel quite strongly about this, but until today I didn't know quite why I felt it was such a moral issue.

It came to me as I was processing that comment from my colleague. When you sort, you are emphasizing differences. When you grade to sort, you may care about learning, but you care much more about differences in learning.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone” (pp. 109–110).

President Ezra Taft Benson quoted this line in his famous discourse about the dangers of pride. He said, "The proud make every man their adversary by pitting their intellects, opinions, works, wealth, talents, or any other worldly measuring device against others."

And, I would add, grading as sorting does nothing more than encourage, play into, and make possible this pride. By taking away the focus from the knowledge students have gained -- and putting it on how much more knowledge they have than their fellow travelers, we are putting the focus squarely on pride.

As President Benson said, "Pride is the universal sin, the great vice. Yes, pride is the universal sin, the great vice."

Now it's possible that people could go through the grading-as-sorting process and remain unaffected. After all, you don't have to be prideful even if you are sorted. But it's an invitation, and it's certainly a message about what we find important. And to be honest, I can't think of a single advantage to the grading-as-sorting system, and certainly nothing that makes it worth sending the message that what's most important about learning is where you stand in relation to others.

That may be the nature of the fallen world, and I may have to be in it, but I sure as heck don't have to be of it.

Education Doth Make Fools of Us All

I am a mathematics educator by training and vocation, meaning I teach students who want to be math teachers, and I research how mathematics is taught and learned. And by nature and choice I'm an ivory-tower academician, who doesn't really want to deal with the politics that are an inherent part of education. That isn't always possible, of course, seeing as how the Math Wars rage on, particularly in my little corner of the U.S.

This blog will let me blow off some steam, craft some arguments, and refine my thinking about education in general and mathematics education in particular. Feel free to join in.

But as for today's story: I'm always amazed how easy it is for PhD's, trained in rational, logical, scientific thinking, who pride themselves, in fact, on being logical and objective in their work, to become completely irrational when it comes to education. It's like an M.D. leaving his research lab, coming home, and sacrificing chickens to try to cure a cold.

I was visited in my office by a colleague, who was hoping to gain my support on a proposal to adopt a mathematics competency test for those wishing to become elementary school teachers. The argument was essentially this: Massachusetts recognized that their elementary school teachers didn't have enough math content knowledge, so they created some guidelines for the mathematical training of prospective elementary teachers, and a math competency test for them to pass before being granted a teaching certificate. Apparently they did this about 10 years ago, and now, according to my colleague, their student are scoring at the top of the NAEP test in math. Later, he told me that they had really just started requiring the test a year or so ago, and the initial passing rate was something like 27%

Now I haven't bothered to check on any of these facts yet, but even so I can say with some confidence that if they just started giving the test, and if very few of their teachers passed, then the test hasn't had time to have any effect on the bulk of their elementary school teachers. In short, IT WASN'T THE TEST THAT MADE THEIR NAEP SCORES GO UP! (sorry for screaming, but I get tired of this stuff). And yet that was the clear implication of his earlier argument; he wanted me to believe that if we do what Massachusetts did, our NAEP scores will go up too.

Mathematicians and scientists are very proud of the hard thinking and relentless logic it takes to figure things out in their field. Apparently educational issues don't demand the same level of rigor -- they can just magically tell what needs to be done there. I would say they apply the Urban Legend Test to educational thought: if it happened to a friend of a friend, it's true.

I'll see if I can track down the facts of the matter in Massachusetts. Perhaps I misunderstood the argument. But I don't think so. I think it was the usual snake-oil.

Welcome to my world.