Grading distorts and bastardizes our love for learning

When I share that I assess my students everyday without ever needing to grade, I tend to get some very odd reactions. Because most people grow up with grading, many of us have been led to believe that learning and grading are synonymous. It's as if that because we know where there's smoke their's fire, we (wrongly) extrapolate that where there are grades there's learning.

It's more than a little ironic that many assume grading and learning to be synonyms, while others see them for what they really are -- antonyms.

So why is this?

In her post titled Distorted Vision: Knowing your own culture in order to know others, Sondra Thiederman puts it this way:

It is as if each of us is a fish in a fish bowl. The fish swims around inside the bowl and is surrounded by water and glass. The fish is unaware of the water and the glass and, most important, does not realize that those two substances distort the accuracy with which he sees the outside world. Our culture is like that water and glass. We see the world through a distorted screen created by our deeply and often subconsciously-held values and beliefs.

While a fish isn't aware of the glass and water, people immersed in school can't recognize how grading distorts and bastardizes our love for learning. Like a fish immersed in water, we are drowning in grading, and for the most part, we don't even know it.

Seth Godin tells this story in his book Linchpin:

A guy is riding in the first-class cabin of a train in Spain and to his delight, he notices that he's sitting next to Pablo Picasso. Gathering up his courage, he turns to the master and says, "Senior Picasso, you are a great artist, but why is your art, all modern art, so screwed up? Why don't you paint reality instead of these distortions?" 

Picasso hesitates for a moment and asks, "So what do you think reality looks like?" 

The man grabs his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife. "Here, like this. It's my wife."

Picasso takes the photograph, looks at it and grins. "Really? She's very small. And flat, too."

We've immersed ourselves so much in grading that we can't even recognize that they are imaginary. Similar to how a photograph makes us small and flat, grades reduce learning to a mere symbol -- an A or 67% -- but neither the photograph or the grade can paint reality. They are only as real as constructs can be real - which isn't very much. When compared to a real person or real learning, both the photo and the grade are fraudulent fabrications. It may be convenient for us to pretend these fabrications are real but that doesn't make them so.

And until we come up for air and see grades for what they really are, small and flat, we will continue to experience learning as nothing more than a means to an end that most students can't wait to be rid of.