Education is one of the most fundamental things that we, as human beings, have access to. Learning is part of our lives. So is competition. However, when the latter overrides our humanity, things do not look good.
One of the most common situations where we see this override is with grades.
My friend Serj Hunt showed me this amazing article by Sean Michael Morris. It’s called: When we talk about grades, we are talking about people and I’ve spent a couple of days digesting my own thoughts about it and the impact that grading has on students.
In his article, after recalling a personal story, Sean says:
A person is not a person unless they are willing to sacrifice a letter grade.
Even though in Europe we grade based on numbers, this principle still remains.
When faced with a situation where we can have a real, positive impact on someone’s life, but we must choose between that or maintaining a good grade, we’re basically being asked: “Are you human? or just a machine?”.
Unfortunately, a lot of students won’t help the old lady cross the road, or the person who’s lost because they know that they can’t get a 20 (or an A) if they arrive late to class.
The fact that this is even a possibility is preposterous, right?!
Grades have a deep impact on how students perceive life and themselves.
They're either a person (willing to sacrifice a grade for a good deed as a Human) or a machine that only cares about numbers and facts.
We are raising more and more kids to be the latter…
One of our greatest battles at What Drives Youth is helping Portuguese students to understand that they're not a number on a sheet. They're human beings that cannot be measured by grades.
Because grades lack subjectivity. They ignore the basis of human experience: perception.
You're trying to rationalize what cannot be rationalized, choosing to ignore the most human part of our experience in order to promote, what, some kind of order?
Sean, in his article, says that ungrading, like Titanic, has become "everyone's favorite movie of the moment". I don't think that's bad. In fact, I think that's pretty good, as long as we all understand some principles about it.
Like Titanic, ungrading is appealing because of its romance, it's impendingness. Only this time we are the iceberg and tradition is the ship.
Ungrading is an element in the art form that it's Teaching.
I call it an art form because true teachers are artists, painting specific pieces on a canvas that is going through a transformational process, the students.
Teaching it's not linear. You can't teach in a rigid, solid way. You have to be like water, flowing, adjusting your approach to the students in front of you.
It goes beyond the classroom or the zoom call. It's an active part of the student's life, not only the teacher's. A good class, great teaching, will make a difference in a student's day, week, month, or even life. I still carry lessons I've learned with some of the greatest teachers and mentors I've had and none of them focused on grades. They focused on helping me find out what path I had to forge to be better.
Not to get a good grade, but to be a more complete individual.
However, it's hard to explain why this is important to a lot of the people that can make this change.
Ungrading "has to have pedagogical purpose, and to be part of a larger picture of how and why we teach" says Sean, and that's the hardest part, isn’t it?
We need to understand the full context. When looked at individually, ungrading will seem incomplete, because we're looking at it through the lens of the current educational paradigm. One must create a new one, where ungrading is already present. Where it's not a weird character but part of a whole new plot.
A new way to educate and teach.
Grades are a finite expression of a finite understanding of a field, of a knowledge, experience, or wisdom which could be—which should be—boundless.
It's like using meters to calculate weight! It's impossible because they don't serve the same purpose! They don't obey the same rules or share the same principles. A student's transformation is something unique, that cannot be understood and represented by a number/letter.
Teaching our kids to value grading above everything else is to make them forget about learning and focus on memorizing. Sean says it brilliantly:
Because we want a good grade we hold ourselves back from learning.
I know I did!
I had questions that were never answered by teachers. Why? Because they were never asked! I was afraid that my question would pose as dumb and hurt my final grade so I kept quiet.
The best way to learn something is to try it out. Questioning that piece of knowledge, breaking it apart, or building something with it. These come with a lot of trial and error.
Failure is a fundamental principle to learn, yet, we punish it!
As Milton Dias, a psychologist and co-author of "Ensaio sobre a Juventude" [Essays on Youth] says:
Everyone knows that failure is part of life. Yet, when we’re young, people punish us for trying different things and scare us [in school] by drawing red crosses all over our wrong answers.
We develop this existencial fear of error.
How can we expect students to learn that way?
We can’t.
That’s why, as Sean says:
Ungrading is not about grades, but about people.
At WDY, we don't grade our courses. Students submit their assignments, we give them feedback and that's it. Once they complete the courses, we give them a certificate and help them with any other questions.
I know that we have the "luxury" to do that. We're not bound by bureaucracy or anything else. However, our main goal is to make students realize that, what they feel when they finish a course, that transformation, is enough. In fact, it's the one thing that matters. Because, even though they don't have a grade, they have a feeling of accomplishment.
And that's what's important.
If you have any kind of role in the educational space, either as a teacher, parent or edtech entrepreneur, please help students realize that they’re not a grade, but something far greater. Also, help other teachers and educators to think differently about ungrading.
I’ll finish with a great question, posed by Sean in his article:
Ask “what am I actually teaching?” Or ask “what’s the most important thing for a professional in my field to be capable of?” And then bend your teaching in that direction
Do that, and you’re doing your part in changing the educational paradigm we’re living.