First off, I give him props
for managing to incorporate cats, soup, grades, and inception in an esoteric
clusterfuck of an assembly. I can’t speak much to the first two segments, but I
do think our former Upper School Principal candidate brought up an intriguing
idea in Part the Third. Here’s the
policy he was advocating for, in case any of you missed it: relinquish public letter
grades for 9th grade students at Park. Kids would still, however, receive
grades, and their parents would still get their child’s report in the mail. But
under the new plan, instead of having your paltry freshman grades saved on
record for colleges to gossip over, they would instead see nothing from that
year. K.C.’s justification for this scheme ran something like, ‘it would
provide a smoother transition for eight-graders and they wouldn’t feel as
pressured to perform, thus allowing them to concentrate on learning and
adjusting.’
His argument makes sense to me, and in context with our
philosophy, it sounds like a logical Park
move. But I think there are aspects that have been overlooked. I know our
school likes to brag about not giving grades in middle school, and I suppose,
technically, that’s true. Except that we did get grades, they were just in
numerical/symbolic form. Let’s be real, when you got your math test back and it
said “OK” on it, you could infer, with adequate precision, your “grade range”.
We weren’t that ignorant back then, and neither were our parents. Perhaps more
malevolently, our grades were disguised from us, masked with a veil of
ambiguity, only for us to discover the truth in a few short years. By high
school, we all knew what kind of student we were. There were no surprises at 9th
grade quarter reports, or at least, there shouldn’t have been.
Then there’s the notion of prolongation. Why let kids
wait another year until they have to face the realities of high school and the
rest of their lives? I hold the position of the sooner, the better. Eventually,
the mother has to kick her hatchlings out of the nest and force them to survive
independently. The longer we coddle our students, the harder reality is gonna
smack them in the face when the time comes. And contrary to ninth grade, tenth
grade actually matters. You want as much practice with these new-fangled “grade”
things as possible.
I’m sure most of us would love to live in a world free of
evaluation, and I respect Park’s initiative to address this, but the system isn’t
changing anytime soon. We can try to go against the grain, but in the end we
have to accept that some factors are out of our control for now.
So
that’s where I stand. What do you guys think? Am I being cynical?
no one cares about what you have to say! where is that funny guy?
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