Grading is a Tool of the Man

Short post today boys and girls. I have a ton to do today, including end-of-semester grading. I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but I really, really, really, really (this could go on for a while....) HATE grading. I don't mind evaluating work. I don't mind giving constructive feedback. I don't even mind being a hardass sometimes in order to get people's attention, so that they might demonstrate some self-respect, some respect for me, and some respect for the process of learning. Grading, though, is not as useful. Let's take a quick look at why that might be.

Herb Childress, writing in 1998, found himself wondering why students who couldn't care less about what they do in classrooms, all of a sudden became hard-working outside of the classroom context. He looked at (American) football for his answers. According to Childress:

In the school that I observed, I saw striking -- and strikingly consistent -- differences between the perfunctory classroom sessions and lively extracurricular activities. The same students who were emotionally absent from their classes came alive after school. We say, "If only she'd spend as much time doing her algebra as she does on cheerleading . . ." with the implication that students blow off algebra because they're immature. We don't usually think to turn the question around and ask what it is about the activities they love that is worthy of their best effort. We don't usually ask what it is about school that tends to make it unworthy of that kind of devotion. But if we're interested in looking at places of joy, places where students lose track of how hard they're working because they're so involved in what they're doing, places where teenagers voluntarily learn a difficult skill, places that might hold some important lessons for schools, football is a good choice.



In his analysis of football, he found seventeen (that's right, seventeen) reasons why. Here's what he found:

1. In football, teenagers are considered important contributors rather than passive recipients.

2. In football, teenagers are encouraged to excel.

3. In football, teenagers are honored.

4. In football, a player can let the team down.

5. In football, repetition is honorable.

6. In football, the unexpected happens all the time.

7. In football, practices generally run a lot longer than 50 minutes.

8. In football, the homework is of a different type from what's done at practice.

9. In football, emotions and human contact are expected parts of the work.

10. In football, players get to choose their own roles.

11. In football, the better players teach the less-skilled players.

12. In football, there is a lot of individual instruction and encouragement from adults.

13. In football, the adults who participate are genuinely interested.

14. In football, volunteers from the community are sought after.

15. In football, ability isn't age-linked.

16. Football is more than the sum of its parts.

17. In football, a public performance is expected.

Now, mind you, I personally didn't like playing football that much. The games were kind of fun, but I hated practice with a passion. I hated losing games. Winning games was great. But Childress gets something here. Ving Tsun kung fu (VTKF) was a lot more fun for me, because we don't evaluate or grade or win or lose. More or less, people have some things they're working on, they show up for class, and they work on them. There is no right or wrong, in the sense that "grading" as such would suggest. Rather, everyone is seen to need to improve and perfect whatever they're working on. So we get together in order to see more examples, and to have partners to share the work with and to do things we would be unable to do alone (e.g., two-person training activities).

Okay, I got some of this written already, so I'll just include it. The post will be long today, after all:

Let us say, for example, that what we want to assess is the total quantity of kung fu a student has. Assuming that this is a physical skill, we assign it to assessment of its physical manifestation. We put the student to the test. Instead of simply matching him or her against an ideal opponent, the embodiment of "the true kung fu" (a benchmark or standard), we must put him or her up against a real person, as such an ideal practitioner does not exist. Then we create a testing situation, say a sparring session. We set up a system of rules for the test, and a set of indicators to take as data from it. However, both the rules and the indicators measured must be limited to ensure that they can be assessed in the first place and that they can be taken as determinant measures of what we predefine as "kung fu." Further, if we do not want the people tested to be gravely injured, or worse, we must limit the testing situation. Suppose that we create a set of guidelines to determine legal and illegal tactics in the game defined by the test. Automatically, we limit the full range of skills the student can bring to bear in the testing situation. It may be that the skills we proscribe might mean the difference between success and failure. Even more so, the test is but a singular instance of the manifestation of the standard to be tested. Things might have gone better or worse, had the conditions of the test been different, or if different people had been involved. What might have happened in an ideal situation is, then, only a construct, one that assumes far too little possibility for error in measurement.

VTKF does not engage in such assessment. I think part of the assumption behind this is that the "testing situation" is not a real situation. One cannot assume that what is manifested at a particular time is the sum of what has been learned. Instead, VTKF substitutes a more student-driven conception of assessment. Here I will consider three aspects of it: no mistakes, constant assessment without accountability systems, and multiple bases for self-assessment.
No Mistakes

“No mistakes” is a primary principle of VTKF pedagogy. It means, more or less, that substandard performance is not really a problem. Instead, mistakes or uncertainty of knowledge indicate areas for individual improvement. They are not, however, occasions to comment on the state of the “guilty” party. The mistake happened somehow, and probably for some reason, but what is it? What is different, here, is that the standard is personalized. There is no ideal performance outside of persistence of application: even then, one must have freedom to relax, to take breaks, and not to force the learning to happen. One does what one does, and that is enough. You did it that way for some reason, and hopefully you got something out of it. Jana suggested that part of the reason for this attitude relates to the naturalness of one’s personal experience:

In a kung fu school, nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. Right now, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Always. And then there’s time to work on details, you know. It’s not that it’s wrong, or that it’s been wrong. It’s just time to do this. And that’s great. It’s very freeing. Nothing is wasted. Even if you’ve been doing it one way, and now it’s time to do it this way, did you get anything from doing it that one way? Yeah. You did. So, that’s very different from standard education.

The student, it is supposed, must constantly engage his or her own practice at a meta-level, looking at what is done and how it is done, and working out ways to make it better. Energy spent on constructing crisis situations out of what is very normal and natural situation is energy wasted. This system of assessment assumes the fact of error, contrary to assessment in SBR, and naturalizes and “decriminalizes” it through the “no mistakes” frame. By doing so, it is possible, according to Bill, to make students much more comfortable with improving practice as a result of assessment, and does not discourage them from practicing:

No one ever makes you feel like you're doing anything wrong. … Telling someone they're doing it wrong isn't really going to correct the error a whole lot. They might think about it a bit more, which is good, but it's really hard to do something right being just told without actually practicing it a lot. And if you're constantly being told you're doing it wrong, you're not going to practice. If you don’t practice, you’re not going to learn.

Finally, in addition to being natural to the context of VTKF, mistakes are seen as resources for developing a more comprehensive understanding. Simply, pursuing a mistake, and what makes it a mistake, provides not just the binary distinction between “right” and “wrong,” it also provides a mechanism for self-correction, and a way to determine, by degrees and applications, what is “right” or “wrong.” Given that, self-assessment and self-correction become the basis for quite a lot of learning:

Mistakes are almost encouraged. If you’re not trying to do it, you’re not making mistakes, but you’ll never learn. So, people are really encouraged to explore off to the side and actually see why they do it. You don’t see that in regular schools. It’s set in concrete: You do it this way. They should encourage it when a kid raises his hand and goes, “I don’t see why they do it that way,” instead of just telling them to shut up. Actually letting the kid figure out why they did it that way [would be better]. (Ernie)

It is not so much that there is not the idea of making mistakes in the first place, in VTKF pedagogy. People do, in fact, make mistakes constantly. What is different from SBR is that there is no formal accountability system to dictate particular varieties and levels of performance from students. This is not to say that they are not evaluated, by themselves and by others; rather, they are not at the same time subject to value statements about the adequacy of their performance, or punished for deficient performance, at least by anyone but themselves. There is broad recognition in VTKF circles, I think, that every time one corrects a student, one alters what is both natural and desirable: the student’s own understanding of and approach to the material, which forms the basis of his or her understanding of its relevance and value, and of his or her own.
Constant Assessment without Accountability Systems

For that reason, it is important that students develop, first, a sense of the value of their own efforts. VTKF instructors try not to jump immediately on the mistakes they see, leaving experience to teach the students the “right” way to do whatever it might be, and only occasionally leading them away from the sorts of things that might cause them trouble. Jana, my sihing, spoke to me about her experiences in opening up her own VTKF club when she moved away from the home school:

I will tell my students things that are appropriate. Like you don’t just want to sit there and just stare at somebody playing a form. You want to play a form? If they ask you to watch them it’s fine. It’ll never happen, but it’s fine. But you don’t just want to stand there and watch. I’ll let them know. I wouldn’t do it if they were doing that. I would let them do it, and then I would let them know later. I’ve seen people lounge on the johng. It’s real hard not to go over and move them. You don’t want to do it while they’re doing it, because then they’ll get the sense that they’ve done something wrong. You tell them later, and in an offhand way, so they know. They’re probably just curious and want to be near it because it’s this cool-looking thing.

Some practitioners are better at laying off their juniors than others, but a laissez-faire ethos pervades the larger practice of the collective. Some people even begin to question other ways in which they have been evaluated, and the very concept of grading itself. Bill, my sidai, said in an interview:

Bill: I think that the grades only hinder performance and learning. I understand their necessity, because people need a way to see that they're learning. The students are learning and that they're getting something out of it, and to be able to, you know, say who's better or whatever. … It's just like that: People will cheat to get good grades; and people work hard and get good grades, and if you work hard you learn it, and if you cheat you don't. But then what's the grade worth, if you didn't learn anything. You have these grades. What's the point?

EDJ: Why would someone cheat then?

Bill: Because that's what we base it on. We base everything on grades. You get into college based on your GPA, so if you have good grades you get in. They don't test you really. I mean they give you the ACT or whatever, but I don't know. It just seems like the grading scale is what it's all about, and not what you learn really.

When assessment is divorced from what actually is learned, and when grades are raised to the status of fetish, then we have a problem. SBR is replete with instances of this problem, whether in terms of equating test scores with learning, or in terms of differential treatment of students based on those scores, especially the “failures.” I believe that VTKF provides a model for how a better situation might be achieved.
Multiple Bases for Self-Assessment

What underlies the individual effort of each student is his or her participation in training collectively with other members of the school. One aspect of this collective dimension comes from one of Sifu's frequent admonitions that each student should "touch a lot of hands" (work with a lot of other students during training time). That is, individual insights are derived from collective practice, during which a student brings his or her own kung fu into play with others' own versions of the kung fu. This provides students with multiple bases for comparison rather than a single "correct" basis for comparison (i.e., a “standard” or “benchmark”), whether that is simply his or her own kung fu or some other ideal of what the kung fu should be, feel, or look like.

At the same time, however, the same system of constructs (e.g., drills, forms, etc.), grounds the practitioners’ collective practice in the details of the style. Each student is free in what he or she does with what he or she already knows, but that knowledge is derived from a discrete system of possible knowledge: the VTKF system. However, this body of knowledge just seems to get deeper and more complex as time goes on; it does not get any easier.

The most important things to come out of this sense of assessment are that: (1) there is no “perfect” rendition of the thing evaluated; (2) all performances can provide the possibility for enhanced knowledge; and (3) having more collective knowledge at one’s disposal, and more bases for evaluation, means that one can learn more. I believe that one result of this is to deflect student attention, once again, in one more way, away from comparative valuation against one’s peers, and back toward the material itself.

More or less, grades can serve a useful purpose, but the way they are used in most educational situations is more about valuation of students than it is about evaluation of their work so that they feel self-motivated to improve it. If I could just have a student in my classroom for the right amount of time (which would vary), I think I could get nearly everyone to about the same level. However, I only get sixteen weeks. Then I have to value them, grade them like so many potatoes.

Oh, well... back to grading.