Well, it's finally the end of the semester.  Boy, do I need the
good cheer of the holiday season.  The lingering goodbyes and the tearful
till we meet agains with students during the last-day-of-class closure has
been replaced this past week by a grateful and relieving feeling that a
suffocating weight has been lifted.  This past week is that dirgeful coda
to the joyful semester with students when I do not feel happy, when my
feet and heart are heavy, when my energy is depleted, when I feel dirty
and corrupted, almost evil.  My teeth hurt from all the angry gnashing
I've done this past week. After doing everything within my power to
instill a love of learning, arouse a belief in each student of his or her
own unique potential, convince each of them that there's nothing average
about any of them, persuade them that there's a hell of a lot more
meaningful to an education than merely getting a grade, it would be so
easy to now feel like a sellout.  It's that time when I realize once again
how the formal institution of education has become such a barrier to the
spiritual experience of learning.  You all know what time it is.  It is
that time when the whole concept of love of learning is almost totally
undermined by the most anti-learning, fear inducing devise conceived by
the mind of man.  It's the time of concocting final grades.  If I was a
drinking man, I'd go out and get snookered, three sheets to the wind
snookered.

        Instead, of flaying myself, I've got a question.  Actually I have
a bunch of questions.  Why is it that so many people--students, faculty,
administrators, parents, et al--get nervous, defensive, testy, upset,
downright aggressive when some of us seem to be playing with the
definition of academic success?  Is it because by questioning grades as
the absolute measure of achievement, some of us are asking if achievement
is as easy to attain and define as it is made to seem?  Is it because we
don't want to face the fact that a lot of us are conscious of the fact
that grades don't make the grade, that achievement isn't always what it
seems?  Is it because we want a cookbook of precise, objective, how-to-do
techniques for identifying academic achievement and thereby avoiding the
inevitable subjective messiness of human interaction?  Is it because we
have a difficult time facing the fact that education is as much, if not
more, art than it is science?  Is it because we prefer the easily
manageable quantifying definition that education is about measurable
information transmitting and receiving to a difficult to manage
transcending and amorphous definition that education is all about
unimaginable diverse people?  Is it because we don't want to think about
the tension we help create between conformity and freedom, between
uniformity and uniqueness?  Is it because we profess we don't want
students to ask submissively "what do you want" and then demand in word or
deed they submissively do what we want?  Is it because we don't want to
think about the tension between "love the system and dismiss the people"
on one hand and "love the people and hate the system" on the other.  Is it
because we don't want to think about how grades make it harder to respect,
understand, appreciate, love, have faith it, have hope for each person
whom we are grading?  Is it because we don't want to think how we have
been duped into believing, to paraphrase the Bard, that "the grade doth
make the person?"  Is it because we don't want to think about how we
somehow convert guesses, approximations, impressions, suggestions,
estimatations, hunches into truth?  Is it because we don't want to think
about the fact that Magna Cum Laude in academics doesn't automatically
translate into Magna Cum Laude outside of and beyond the academy--or even
inside it?  Is it because while we pronounce that we understand that
others don't understand, we really not sure we understand what it we
understand or are supposed to understand?  Is it because in denial we
don't want to admit that we're addicted and corrupting "gradeoholics" who
can't really stop any time we want?  Is it because we don't want to face
what we really mean when we say, "He got a low grade, but has come a long
way and has learn an awful lot?"  Is it because we don't want to face what
students mean when they say, "It's a snap course.  I won't learn much, but
it will up my GPA?"  Is it that we just don't want to think about it?

        I sometimes think and feel so many in our academic culture, if so
many in our society as a whole, has raised the concept of grades to the
depths of infallible dogma to be unquestioningly obeyed, and frowns on
such tinkering and sees such questions as heretical departures from THE
ABSOLUTE TRUTH.


Make it a good day.

                                                       --Louis--


Louis Schmier                            www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History                    www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698                    /~\    /\ /\
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