Week 2-Comment on Michael's blog

Michael,
You make some very interesting points and ask great questions.  It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of "It's all invented", but it guess it does make sense.  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the idea of there being no grades, but I do think we need to re-think our system.  I attended a Marzano training once, and the presenter talked a lot about grades and the idea of separating behavior from content knowledge, which we pretty much already do in performance-based classes.

Michael's original post:

WK2 Reading: Outside the Box? What Box?

How would you grade this assignment?

The Art of Possibility by Rosemead and Benjamin Zander has been an interesting read thus far.  I’ve found that their work has put many of my personal feelings about education and life in general into writing and have articulated these concepts and many more in an intriguing and honest way.

“It’s all invented.”  This is a powerful statement that in and of itself can cause a paradigm shift in one’s thinking or the thinking of others.  I believe meditating on this phrase can lead to a great deal of questioning, with one question in particular taking the forefront: Why?  Why do we think the way we think about things?  What is the source of our preconceived notions about life in general, education specifically?  Why do we concern ourselves so with managing perceptions of who we are, when our true selves have yet to be revealed even to us?  The quote “it’s all invented” certainly lends itself to an out of the box approach to life’s many questions, but it goes even a step further in leading one to ask the question: was there ever a box in the first place, or was that simply a preconceived notion based on past experiences? 

The existence of a universe of possibilities would indicate that there is a box, or a barrel, or open space, or any number of other possible containers or non-containers.  In our current mode of thinking, strongest consideration defaults to the concrete and the tangible, when the very fiber of creation and creative activity almost exclusively derives from the abstract and intangible.  Relationships and our thinking about them create the atmosphere for the creation of the concrete and tangible, or the transformation from abstract to concrete and intangible to tangible.  One has to move away from looking at what’s there to truly see what’s there: look into the other person’s eyes and consider what’s going on behind those eyes, hear one’s words and listen to what’s really being said, “feel” where a person is coming from, empathetically, not physically.

I have long had a strong disdain for grades.  I didn’t like them in grade school (pardon the expression), didn’t like them in undergrad and probably would not assign them in my learning environment if I were not required to do so.  I agree with the quote, “…Grades say little about the work done.”  To go even further, I believe that grades typically are not indicative of learning or even true knowledge, but are instead more indicative of obedience and following directions.  If student does A, B and C as instructed, the student receives an A or other “passing grade”.  Sometimes passing grades are signs of passing interest in a subject of content.  In an ideal teaching scenario, one could assess individual students based on their own growth, not a generalized standard that seldom applies to specific life and professional situations and outcomes.  If we could give real A’s in education in all contents and environments, students would reap tremendous benefits on a personal level as much as a professional one.