Committing the Inevitable Educator Betrayal.

My job has a conflict of interest with my job. Actually, if I think about it, there may be more than one. In any case there is at least one very clear pair roles which I’m supposed to simultaneously fill in the classroom, and I’m not sure these roles are easily reconciled with one another.

On the one hand, I’m supposed to be a facilitator. My role is that of a tour-guide, guru, translator and generally experienced dude. Ultimately the student needs to do the work to learn something, but I’m there to try and clear the weeds out of the path. In order to be effective in this role it is very helpful if I can gain the student’s trust. It’s a difficult thing to admit you’re clueless, but if a student isn’t able to be open with me about that then I can’t help. Failure is an important part of the learning process. If I can engender enough trust that the student’s feel free to try something difficult, fail at it, and try again, then I’m doing well in my job as a facilitator.

On the other hand, the system in which I teach is not set up in isolation. Students don’t, for the most part, go to school just for the joy of learning. We live in a world where knowledge and understanding is a commodity which is bought and sold on a daily basis. Indeed, the other role I’m supposed to fulfill is one of assessor. I’m supposed to assess the student’s understanding of the subject and, effectively, provide the student with the capital they have to play in the knowledge economy. (In reality, this capital is pretty short lived, usually only lasting as long as the next job/school application process, but it’s important to that extent.)

Now student’s aren’t stupid. They know that the grade they get out of a course has a tangible affect on their future and well-being. This tends to make them a bit touchy about their grades and leads to a distortion of the learning process. Students tend to view the grade as the result of taking a course and classes take on a kind of sports metaphor. You play the game until there’s a result, and then you forget about it and look to the next challenge. Educators tend to use a architectural metaphor, focussing on understanding as the desired result, and expecting students to build on that understanding in the next course. Thus the clash becomes visible.

If I’m acting as an assessor, that tends to put me in an adversarial position, not an enabling one. It undermines the trust and safety of the classroom because futures are on the line. As an assessor I’m expected to punish failure while at the same time as a facilitator I’m trying to encourage risk taking. As an educator, I’d like to assign really challenging problems which really push students to make cognitive leaps. If I then turn around and coldly assess their failure, then I’ve undermined the very process I was trying to encourage.

In other words, I hate grades.

At the same time, I’m not certain what could be done about it. Ultimately, knowledge and understanding do have value, but it’s damned hard to assess. Proper assessment takes time and as the classroom instructor I’m probably most qualified to make that assessment. If we take grades out of the school system then it needs to be replaced by something else, because eventually the student needs to participate in the knowledge economy. If I’m not assessing, then potential employers or grad schools etc will be doing the same. But likely they will be doing it with less information then I have. Of course, I throw a lot of that information away when I just boil a student’s progress with a subject down to a single number.

So generally I practice the art of deception. I try my best to downplay grades, and then quietly betray them to the registrar at the end of the semester.