End of (School) Days

The close of the semester - and the accompanying grading - always makes me ponder the nature of our current educational evaluative system and all its flaws, variants, and benefits. My husband frequently objects to the idea of "grades" as "meaningless" or "false" indicators of ability. And in some ways, he's right.

First, what any particular grade means is somewhat arbitrary from system to system - an A at one institution might be a B at another, and a third institution might not even have an A. Growing up, my grade school did not use standard grades; we had O (Outstanding), V (Very good), S (Satisfactory), U (Unsatisfactory), and N (Not acceptable). As far as we were concerned, it was the same system. It translated when we moved to high school into "normal" letters. The difference between an O and an A was simply the form of the mark on the paper. My high school used the standard system, but an A in an AP class was a 5.0 instead of a 4.0. My undergraduate university didn't use pluses or minuses, but slash grades: A, A/B, B, and so on, which meant that I might have a lower GPA with an A/B than a student who earned an A- at another institution, even though I might have been doing better work objectively speaking. These are problems with non-standardized grades.

And then there are the objections to an evaluative system altogether. The idea that we should simply "appreciate" the efforts of our students without giving them a grade. On one hand, I understand and, yes, "appreciate" this impulse. But on the other hand, shouldn't there be a distinction between outstanding quality of work and simply adequate quality? Shouldn't we recognize that a complete assignment can be done with more and less effort, and that those levels of effort should produce different results?

This leads to another "problem" with grading: sometimes you have a student who puts in a lot of effort and does "worse" than another student who puts in less effort. Some people are naturally talented. Does this mean they should do "better" with less work? Does this mean we are "punishing" people who put in much more work but can't produce the same quality end-product? I tend to say "yes, we can reward the better product, regardless of the amount of work put into it." Because one of these two things is objectively better. If given a choice of the final product without knowledge of the effort put into it, most people will choose the better product - in business, in art, in any field. And it is a fact - an often frustrating fact - that some people just aren't capable of producing work at the same level as others (at least in a given area).

And, finally, there is the current hot-button issue of grade inflation. The idea that students have come to expect As in all their classes for doing the bare minimum of work. An A is the new C. This bothers me, most particularly because it means that the people who DO produce better work (whether through effort or talent) are told that their superior product is the same as a much inferior product. It just isn't fair.

And that's what, I believe, grading all boils down to. One camp that wants people to feel good about their work and one that wants an objective system of evaluation. Personally, I want people to feel good about work they've done well. I want grades to mean something, whether a reward for hard work or an acknowledgment of innate talent. But we also need to recognize that there are average students, and that those students should not feel bad for getting an "average" grade.

I want my students to earn their grades. I want them to produce work worthy of the mark I give it. But I also want them not to feel inadequate for not being "the best" at something. I want them to be happy that they can improve their skills without needing to be "the best." Yes, striving for improvement is good and competition can sometimes foster that, but accepting the grade you've earned is a mark of maturity and understanding, and graciously doing so is a sign that you have learned an even more profound lesson: that you have done your best and accepted your strengths... and your limitations.

Things that go Bump in the Night

Recently I seem to have been unintentionally preoccupied with the supernatural - ghosts, ghouls, dead things, and so on. Not that this is entirely unsurprising, of course. My research involves plays - like, say, Macbeth or The Changeling - that contain not only gruesome deaths, but the returning (and revenging) spirits of the dead. In my other job, I work in a 323-year-old building with a crypt containing around 100 bodies, some of which are visible, with fairly serious noise and electrical "issues" that we like to blame on our resident (dead) Frenchman. I am fascinated by questions of belief, religion, and myth.

Over the last several days, I've been watching old episodes of Ghost Hunters, which seems right in line with this history. But it is something completely different. Instead of approaching the supernatural from the point of view of a literary device, a mythological belief system, or an amusing explanation for antique wiring, ghosts - for these people - are very real phenomena. Most of the time. For people who make a living hunting ghosts, they are very practical and do a good deal of "debunking" of claims.

But it makes me wonder a few things about people. First, why we want to believe in ghosts. Certainly, there is the desire to have proof that death is not the end of our existence. That there is something beyond the physical connection of synapses and cells that makes us us. I buy it. In fact, if someone could definitively prove to me that ghosts are a continuation of human existence, I'd be thrilled.

There is another part of me, however, who finds some of the possible explanations for "ghosting" to be profoundly interesting in a scientific way. Emotion- or energy-impressions, for instance. The idea that we might feel so deeply that we somehow impress some part of our consciousness or emotion into the world around us is profoundly strange. It seems to imply that there are physical laws we don't understand - laws that can explain how the energy of emotions can impact the physical world without what we understand as physical contact. Intriguing, certainly. But it also reminds us how truly ignorant we are about our own world; we don't even understand the basic rules for how we interact with our surroundings, or they with us. It also raises the question of what makes us what we are; are emotional impressions a part of us? Are they capable of feelings and intelligence of their own? Do we really leave behind semi-sentient beings when we feel that intensely?

Finally, the concept of a ghost - so long as I do not know what it actually is - is also profoundly disturbing. Is a ghost a person trapped in a cyclic pattern of emotion and behavior? Restricted to a specific path or area by virtue of some in-life connection or site of death? The idea of being stuck for what amounts to eternity is not a pleasant one.

And if ghosts aren't human at all, then what are they? What else inhabits our world that we cannot see or interact with on a regular basis? What else is out there that we fail to notice at all?

So what do I think they are? I don't. I'm open, in the true sense of an atheist. No one has managed to actually prove anything to me. I know people who believe in them, who have claims of seeing and feeling things. I believe them. I believe that the things they say happened are true. That doesn't mean I know what they are. Maybe they are the dead. Maybe they're "energy-impressions." Maybe they're something else altogether. I don't know. I choose not to try to make a choice.

Now if Pierre walks up to me and introduces himself, you can bet that just as soon as I've had a psych-evaluation I'll be more than happy to believe that ghosts are people. But until then, I'm happy to wait and wonder. Because maybe ghosts are quarks. Or quarks are ghosts. Or something equally strange but fully explainable by science that we just haven't discovered yet.

Remember, just because we don't have an answer doesn't mean there isn't one.