What you say here rings so true. If we are telling our students to complete assignments solely by our own standards, we are assuming that we know the only “right” way to do the work. A student that has a fear of failure will follow the predetermined rules and will stifle their own ideas as not wanting to “rock the boat”. In nature when water is not allowed to flow freely, stagnation results. If we allow students creativity to flow and to find alternative means of coming to the same conclusion, they will carve new channels in the realm of possibilities. It is funny to think about how much time we spend resisting change, when change is the only constant in the universe.
On Saturday, September 4th Jeff Kohls wrote:
I was most struck by chapter 3 of The Art of Possibility, and the concept of Giving an A. One of the first lines of The Third Practice that stood out for me, as I assess and reassess how important grades are to our society, is the in the second paragraph, "grades say little about the work done. When you reflect to a student that he has misconstrued a concept or has taken a false step in math problem, you are indicating something real about his performance, but when you give him a B+, you are saying nothing at all about his mastery of the material, you are only matching him up against other students." (Zander, Zander 25)
It points out that we, as educators, have our own standards and agendas that we impose upon our students, and punish them for not meeting those standards with a lower letter grade. We force our students to literally do it "my way, the right way" which can often suppress their creative abilities, which of course, could be the student's strength in learning. If children have their creative efforts stifled enough, they may lose their ability to think creatively, and we'll simply produce a society of young people who follow well, and rarely lead.
The chapter indicates that one can give an A to anyone from any walk of life. When we acknowledge the respect that should be shown for other members of the human race, putting aside our own standards and predispositions, we can offer an opportunity for a complete, unadulterated opportunity for people to learn themselves.
Jeff Kohls' blog can be found here.
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