We all have days where a small thing makes us unaccountably happy. One of those days, for me, was when we acquired a commercial-grade blender. It had but one speed: “on.” After all, when I put something in the blender I just want it to come out, after a few whirling seconds, blended. This marked the end of unnecessary confusion with an old fourteen-speed blender, which always forced me to ponder whether the button labeled “whip” resulted in faster, slower, or roughly equivalent blending action to the one labeled “frappe.” Why could it not simply be labeled “Speed 8″? After all, eighth gear on a ten speed bike is not called “expeditious” but simply 8th, comfortably nestled between 7th and 9th and respecting the natural order of integers.
How did Starbucks determine that “grande” is smaller than “venti” but bigger than “tall”? Even my four year old comprehends that “large” is bigger than “small,” but understandably can’t differentiate between subtle cross-cultural size differentials in translation. Why is Super High a higher frequency than Ultra High but lower than Extra High?
Yet, I have persevered and mastered the stand-ins for what should be facile ordinal comparisons. Until now.
I am confronted with another simplicity-defying reclassification.
The lexicographically meaningful grades that used to reflect degrees of student performance (A comes before B before C) are being replaced with HP, LP, PA, and SP. Even an X is now offered as an option for the instructor, perhaps as a placeholder for those of us who relish single-letter simplicity. After introspection and even a bit of extraspection, I fail to comprehend how a less transparent recoding of presumably ordered evaluations aids learning, efficiency, or what’s left of my hair.
My son’s preschool teacher grades daily behavior on a scale of zero to four stars. Thinking that was perhaps too antiquated a numerical system, I relayed the teacher’s notes to my son in a more contemporary fashion. “Grande effort following directions; cleaned up toys at frappe speed. Art project, regrettably, received only an HP.” A quizzical look. “How many stars is that, daddy?”
He just doesn’t get it. Neither do I.
Feel free to tell me what you think of my rant. Please rate this post on a scale of Elm to Pine.
UPDATE: I am not the only geek who values the ordinal aspect of grades. The visual brilliance that is xkcd today had this:
An unintended consequence of the new grading structure: this poor little stick figure no longer will find this bit of beauty in his life.
Grades for your rant:
Point of rant: White oak
Writing: Eucalyptus
And two smiley faces.
When I was in college – in the 70s – we had an ‘alternative’ grading system of High Honors, Honors, Pass, and Fail. There were no GPAs and no class rankings. Of course, when you applied to a graduate program or interviewed for a job in the real world, the grad school or prospective employer immediately converted the grades to A, B, C, and F and assigned numerical values (4.0, 3.0, 2.0, and 0) as one would expect. right after I graduated the college voted in a traditional grading system.
Witnessing us going in reverse here at Owen is indicative of the times. We are taking a simple-to-understand, universal system and replacing it with an alien, muddy substitute that inevitably causes some initial confusion and makes it just a bit more challenging to deal with us. That is known as ‘Progress’ – change for change’s sake.
I think the grade thing is all part of the PC culture and not stating the obvious. Where I come from grades are still given in a scale from 1 to 10 (or 100, depending on the school). You get everything right, you get a 10 (or 100), and it goes down from there. Sure, sometimes there are curves and all, but your effort is all numerically recorded… no “subjective” grading…
As for Starbucks and its sizes, I think it is just part of the whole “trying to be cool by using foreign words” that seems completely retarded. Whatever happened to the good old “Big, Medium, Small”? They should have Grande and Chico, but anyway… if they are going to use those words, they should at least learn to pronounce them properly…
As for the blender… I do like that my blender has a thousand buttons for different things
Serendipitously, I had a similar conversation with a student yesterday who asked me what I, as an education professor, thought of the term “fail.” Did I think it sent the right message to students? Did I think it was as effective as other types of feedback.
I gave him four minutes on the uselessness of grades, two minutes on the far superior model of developmental narratives used in Montessori classrooms, and then about nine seconds on how, at the end of the day, I really couldn’t empathize because I’d never gotten an F on anything and so I was really just guessing at how it might feel for the student in that position.
“It sucks a lot.” He said.
I wonder if he would have been consoled by an X.
I wasn’t a good student and at school in London I “achieved” the following results in my O-Levels:
Latin…..U
French….D
Spanish…U
History….D
Reading my grades from top to bottom felt like a message from god.