Like it or not, I deserve an A+ for this column
Mayfield “To strive. To seek. To find” Secondary School in Caledon, a pretty town just northwest of Toronto, is testing getting rid of grades throughout the year. Students in four Grade 9 subjects will consult with the teacher at year’s end and negotiate the grades they feel they deserve.
On the one hand, this is a bit adorable and gives stroppy teenagers a head start on years of arguing, bursting into tears and stomping off. On the other hand, it’s the end of the civilization of which we once dreamed.
I sit in the middle, with one caveat. I deserve an A+ for this column, as soon as I finish writing it, which I will because of a “deadline,” which is another thing Mayfield students don’t have.
As adorable as it may be, Mayfield high’s self-grading experiment is the end of the civilization we once dreamed
The teacher can give them a temporary zero during the school year but must justify retaining the mark, which cannot “distort or misrepresent a student’s actual or overall achievement.”
This column is great and getting greater by the word is my way of thinking. Readers might not agree. Neither might my editor. But they are wrong.
Also, I worked like a fire ant on this.
Recall the now-dismissed education theory that children shouldn’t be praised for their results, but for the hard work they put into being lousy at things. “Good work!” we say to the toddler who can’t quite blow bubbles.
This column blows bubbles, and I didn’t even work hard. My best columns are the ones I’m on fire for. Flames are engulfing me now.
As students settle back into class this week — I still honour this by buying myself a classic back-toschool shoe — the adults are unsettled. Ontario has decided to collect education stats based on race (a blow to multiculturalism and those who think it’s nobody’s business), some schools are postponing Grade 9 streaming into academic or applied, students are bad at math (perhaps because teachers are illprepared), rural schools are closing, buses are late and so on.
Ontario should have stuck with Grade 13, I say, one more year to help kids figure out their personalities and paths, but that is a particularly dead horse and I won’t try to haul the thing upright.
What lies behind all this? Education is more fraught now because everything seems frightful. People are more competitive, fearing imaginary stigma, poor marks, unemployment, the gig economy, falling behind, inadvertent drug addiction, early death, late death.
But basically, what people fear is poorer life chances. This is reason- able. Fearful people make bad choices, and this writhing over school rules is one example. If students fear standards, as they always have, that’s no reason to tear them down.
The new plan, at Mayfield and other schools, will mean students in four subjects will be given constant feedback throughout the year — but were they not already? — and then sit down with teachers and negotiate on the mark.
This will be a learning experience in itself, apparently. As one university dean of education told the Star, “That dialogue then, is another chance for them to engage in the learning process itself, because they’re learning to advocate for themselves, they’re learning to articulate the learning that has taken place within themselves.” OK, then. If students don’t like the marks they’re given, they can appeal. Universities allow this. I hear howls of derisive laughter from university professors and adjuncts under the student gun. It’s trickling down, they say.
Mayfield has an eccentric history. In 2010 students came to school as minstrels in blackface for Halloween. Mayfield’s vice-principal showed up in blackface in 2013. Both he and the principal were later transferred.
The new principal, James Kardash, a former CFL player, has new ideas. As the school’s Mayfield Without Marks website link reports, the self-grading scheme will be “supported” by a New York state teacher and blogger named Starr Sackstein. The website includes American teachers’ blogs, articles, U.S. TEDx local talks and videos.
The U.S. education system lies in wreckage. Why are Canadians adopting their failures?
The website offers no data on no-grading beyond one photocopied link to a 1988 Israeli study. The writing is anecdotal, with one Canadian podcast about Cabbagetown students’ feelings.
There is also what Mayfield calls “a fantastic video” from Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, a huge, controversial U.S. company offering MOOCs (massive open online courses) around the world, or at least supplements to them. There are no teachers as such, perfect for a class without marks.
Is it even permissible in Ontario to add this nonsense to an official school website? Does the union know? No wonder smart Caledon parents are bemused.
Seen from the most generous point of view, perhaps Mayfield is trying to be an “incubator” of new ideas, as they say, a “hub” of progressive learning, the Oberlin University of Ontario high schools in bucolic Caledon.
But I suspect it is taking educational shortcuts and hoping for the best. Mayfield parents will not see it this way. Solid supporters of their 1,900 much-loved fretful teenagers, they won’t tolerate them being shortchanged.