A few weeks ago, my mother tasked me with sorting through a
rubber tub full of memorabilia from my childhood. I’d sorted through many such
tubs over the years, and I never really knew what I’d find inside. This one
turned out to be full of all the stuff that was laid out on display tables at
my high school graduation party. Photos, newspaper articles, trophies, medals,
ribbons, certificates … even a 5-pound solid marble obelisk.
It was bewildering to look through all of it. No one was
around besides my mom, who had obviously seen all of it before, but somehow it
was still embarrassing. Piles and piles of honors and accolades, many of which
I did not remember. Even among the awards I remembered, I was left with the
uncomfortable knowledge that I didn’t work for most of them. Mostly, they just
appeared on my desk or in the mail.
Take, for example, a phenomenon that my high school called
the 4.0 Club. As you likely inferred from the name, one became a member of the
4.0 Club by achieving a 4.0 GPA. I came across a 4.0 Club award as I paged
through a binder of certificates, deciding what to keep and what to toss. I
tossed it without hesitation. Did I remember the 4.0 Club after I saw the
certificate? Sure. Did I have to work to achieve a 4.0 GPA? In many cases, yes.
I had some classes that were easy for me, but also AP level mathematics and
sciences classes that gave me a run for my money. It’s not that I didn’t work
for my 4.0. It’s just that the 4.0 was what I wanted – not a certificate. I
didn’t give a hoot about the 4.0 Club.
As I continued paging through the binder, I came across
another 4.0 Club certificate. And then another. And then another and another
and another. “Good God,” I said to my mom. “Did they give me one of these every
semester?” It seemed so. I tossed them all, incredulous at the uselessness of
it.
To top it all off, after lifting a few more things out of
the rubber tub, I discovered something else. “Well, Mom, I guess they didn’t
give me a 4.0 Club certificate every semester,”
I said.
“No?” she answered.
“No,” I said, blowing the dust of a piece of beveled wood.
“The first time, they gave me a plaque!” Mom looked at the plaque for a moment,
then back at me. I shook my head and added it to the toss pile without another
word.
I have no regrets about tossing the certificates and plaque,
but I thought about the 4.0 Club a lot in the subsequent weeks. Don’t get me
wrong – I wasn’t dwelling on my own experience. It’s not that recalling the 4.0
Club caused resentment or longing for my own high school days. It was just
that, as an educator, something about the idea of it really got to me.
At its very core, my job is about creating better
educational experiences for kids. I write things and I edit things and I test
things and my day to day work can seem a long way from classrooms, but the
experience I imagine for students using materials I create has a huge effect on
what I do. Classrooms of kids live in my head. Those kids represent the kids
who use my materials. And all I could think was, “I knew very well some
computer was spitting out those certificates. I didn’t feel recognized at all,
just slotted into a category. My experience with 4.0 Club is not something I’d
want for my kids.”
A few days after returning to Chicago, I related the 4.0 Club
episode to my sister. “Can you believe they gave out those things every
semester?” I asked.
“You know,” she answered, “not everyone got one of those
semester after semester after semester. For some people, it was a big deal.”
She made a valid point. I tried to imagine the experiences
of different students for whom a 4.0 was not a recurring event. I could imagine
several scenarios. Maybe a student sees that all it takes to get a certificate
is getting a 4.0 – regardless of which classes he takes. He misses the 4.0 his
first semester, and decides to take less challenging things in the future.
Or maybe a student continually tries to achieve the 4.0,
falling a little short sometimes, missing by miles other times, but always
really trying for it. Finally, she gets its, and gets that plaque -- and then
watches half a dozen others get the same thing, and feels lost in the crowd.
And then there is the scenario I find most likely. A student
sees other people getting 4.0 Club plaques and certificates, notes to himself
that he’s just not someone who gets 4.0s, figures everyone else thinks the same
of him,and never expects or aspires for it in the first place.
My sister was right that my experience was not every
student’s experience. But none of those experiences are things I’d want for my
kids.
Something about the 4.0 Club just doesn’t work. By this point,
I was sure of that much. But what is its fatal flaw? I couldn’t put my finger
on it.
It all became clear to me last week, when I attended a panel
discussion with some middle and high school kids. The panel was focused on
educational technology, but at some point the moderator asked what kinds of
things motivated the students.
“Well,” one of them said, “I really don’t need another
certificate.” (I know, right? I
thought, wishing I could talk to her.) “It’d be nice if I got something related
to what I was doing. Like how about a
scholarship related to something I like?”
That’s when it hit me. I realized that the biggest flaw of
the 4.0 Club is the same as the biggest flaw of our whole assessment-driven education
culture: It sets up sameness as the
standard to achieve. It sets a bar at some arbitrary place, and boldly
states that the bar marks the spot that everyone needs to reach. No personal
characteristics, no specific subject matter, no starting point is taken into
account. “Here’s the ideal,” it says. “Your goal is to fit into this mold.”
The saddest and strangest thing about this is that sameness
does not serve anyone well in college or in the workforce. When students get to
college, they’re suddenly asked to pick something they like or excel at,
something that makes them unique – right after spending years being told they
must excel at everything like everyone. They go to job interviews and are asked
what sets them apart, when they’ve been trying for years to achieve sameness.
What a mess.
All of these realizations hit me rapidly. I was still
working my way through them, wondering if this would ever get better for kids,
when another student spoke up. What he said simultaneously broke my heart and
gave me some hope. “I’m a very self-sufficient person,” he said. “I don’t
really need any incentive to keep track of my own schedule and do my homework
and all that.”
“But now and again,” he said, “I would like someone to tell
me that I’m doing a good job.”
“Yes, me too,” said another. “I don’t need a certificate.
And yeah, a scholarship would be nice, but even just someone saying, ‘Hey, I’ve
really seen you improve on this’ would really go a long way.”
Here is a lesson I learn over and over and over again in my
career: Kids aren’t stupid. We tell them that sameness is the standard, and
many of them will diligently try to achieve that, but that doesn’t mean they
like it. It doesn’t mean they don’t realize that they are unique individuals
with strengths and weaknesses. What it does mean is that they often think that
we, the adults involved in their education, forget that. And they now and
again, they just want some small indication that someone notices their unique
efforts.
Heartbreaking, right? But hopeful, too. Because as an
industry, education has lost its ability to give students the kind of
recognition they want and deserve.
But good teachers? They’ve had that in the bag for years.
