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Grades
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From the time that we are first old enough to go to school we are taught that grades are important. They matter. We are rewarded and punished on their basis and we are taught as kids that our value as human beings is a direct correlation to our GPA, or grade average. A kid that gets straight As is better than a kid that gets Ds. A kid that fails a year is "stupid". As I have gotten older I have realized that some of the best learning that I have done, and the sort of information that sticks with me has not been the stuff that I have been taught in a classroom, but the information that life has thrown from me and stuff that interests me. I may not know how to multiply or divide decimals, but I am pretty sure that I know the difference between right and wrong. I spent so many years learning about the French Revolution and the shifts in the British monarchy, but I spent nearly no time (in class) thinking or writing or talking about human rights, the environment and social justice. Though I am lucky, I think I spent more time being able to learn about these things than a lot of other Canadian students thanks to the hard work of a few special teachers.
I'll admit it, in high school I found those grades gratifying. I prided myself on my straight As and saw them as a reflection of my hard work. Now that I am older though, I find grades to be extremely constraining and an inaccurate reflection of who we are as people. Grades put so much pressure upon us, they force us to preform at an ever unreachable level, that they end up crushing most of us. Our lives can be determined by a grade point, we can lose that scholarship that allows us to go to school, we can lose our program and as a result we can say good-bye to all of our hopes and our dreams and say hello to a future of McJobs, where if you re lucky you get to work at a call center. How ridiculous is that?
Grades have sucked much of the pleasure our of learning as we are forced to take in more and more information about topics that we don't particularly care about and write essay upon essay for a professor or a teacher that does not have enough time to care. Our desire for a good "future" - whatever that really is, forces us to take courses in subjects we loathe and pretend to care about. Numbers and the letters A-F determine where our future is going to lie, a determination that was formerly left up to us. Grades enslave us, rather than set us free and they can consume us.
Who gave grades that power and how do where can we go to get that power back?

February 8, 2008 | 3:55 PM Comments  0 comments

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