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:
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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.
