Editor’s note: This op-ed is by award-winning journalist Telly Halkias. It first appeared in the Portland Daily Sun.
I teach college classes regularly, and with each passing year I’m feeling more extinct as a result. Part of this has to do with how much has been made over the last generation of the importance of self-esteem versus hard-earned grades.
As someone who has taught as an adjunct, tutored, and watched my own child progress from elementary school through college, the de-emphasis of grading to standard, or the rise of inflated grades, remains perplexing.
Not that students don’t care about grades; for the most part, that end of the equation hasn’t changed.
Students who tell you they are only focusing on learning and not grades are as disingenuous as a pitcher who insists he didn’t know he had a no-hitter going through seven innings. It just doesn’t happen: Humans keep track and keep score.
This trend in grading causes an obfuscation of two major elements in academia: potential and performance. Each is different, but student expectations in the Digital Age have changed the playing field as to how they’re viewed.
Potential is rooted in past performance. It remains a hazy horizon, difficult to articulate to a generation used to instant gratification by tapping a smartphone.
So in terms of grades, a former student of mine illustrated the conundrum. This scholar struggled to understand my grading standards and how they related to the output – or performance – that I required.
From the first day of class, she began references to past courses, past instructors, and the grades she had garnered from them.
What keeps me sane is that I still get students who, while caring about their grades, don’t argue over methods, and grind it out in the classroom.
Naturally, the scores she felt compelled to recount were stellar as opposed to my marks. It became clear that the connection this student made to her past performance translated as a de facto condition of her sitting in a classroom — even if the ante had been upped in coursework difficulty.
What I further read between the lines was that the de-emphasis on performance to standard – receiving higher marks for lesser work – had contributed to how she perceived her own potential.
But grades aren’t assigned for potential; rather, they are granted, or should be, for performance.
While there are many ways to assess knowledge and evaluate performance, everything comes back to some very basic things: requirements, conditions and standards.
Following instruction, teachers place certain requirements on students under specified conditions to meet a given standard — which results in a grade. Whether that’s an exam, an essay, or a hands-on evaluation is irrelevant. Its purpose is to measure performance.
And performance means someone passes and someone fails. However, a student used to a system where few if any actually fail will struggle when met with the challenge of actually having to get their A, B, C, D or F the old fashioned way: by earning it.
Of course, each passing generation is convinced the next one is going up in flames. So I’ve always been open to the possibility that I’m a dinosaur whose time has passed him by, and that I don’t know what I’m talking about while my charges have all the answers.
What keeps me sane is that I still get students who, while caring about their grades, don’t argue over methods, and grind it out in the classroom. They make adjustments and perform well. They have their own minds but are still respectful of experience and qualifications.
Yet it hasn’t been lost on me how much the other crowd has grown in the last decade.
So what to do? Returning to one-room schoolhouses, sitting in the corner for mischief, and rulers rapping knuckles are clearly passé.
When I teach a college course these days, one irony never escapes me: that I was somewhat of a coaster as a student, right through graduate school. But I always knew where I stood with my grades, and what I had to do to get them, even if that fossil standing in front of the class was clueless.
You may e-mail Telly Halkias at tchalkias@aol.com or follow on Twitter: @TellyHalkias.
