Complications of Grading

First of all, I want to start this post by saying that I’m super thankful for whoever came up with the idea to make a “Blogging Ideas” list because I’ve been fresh out, and I’m also thankful to everyone who put good ideas on that list. So, yeah.

Anyway, as I think about the concept of grades in general, I start to get really angry. Grades are stupid and dictating and evil, and I say this because they used to (okay, they still do) control my life, and I watched them potentially ruin some of my friends’ lives. This is my main issue with grades – students work for the grades, and not the knowledge. I may have blogged about something similar to this before, but I promise I’ll get to the point soon.

I have a fear of teaching. A real, legitimate fear. That fear is that I won’t know how to react when students come to me and accuse me of giving them a grade just because of who they are. Or when students come to me and say they think they should have gotten a better grade. Or when a senior comes to me worried that they won’t graduate because they’re failing my class. Ugh, just thinking about those things stresses me out already. I’m going to break these down one by one.

What happens if a student goes to a teacher and accuses them of ‘favoritism’ essentially? This is a fear of mine because it happened to me and I saw it happen to others, but in opposite ways. In my experience, teachers gave me certain grades just because they knew I was a good student. I grew up in a small town, so most of my teachers had known me my whole life. One specific example was in a junior high science class. After taking a test that I hadn’t even finished completely, I got 100% and so did one of my best friends who was also a good student. We had both left some questions completely blank, there was no curve, and we automatically questioned if the teacher had even graded our tests at all, or if she had just slapped 100% on our tests because she knew we were good students. After that incident, for the rest of my secondary education I was accused of only getting good grades because the teachers favored me. This was really frustrating for me, especially since I worked so hard to maintain a high GPA. It’s also frustrating that one bad teacher gives all other teachers a bad reputation.

My next fear is that I will have students coming to me left and right telling me that they think they deserved a better grade on an assignment. Also, I’m worried about the opposite of that – that students won’t feel comfortable enough to come to me and talk to me about how they’re handling their education/grades. First of all, as covered by the first fear mentioned above, I want to be as fair of a grader as possible. That being said, if a student comes to me and complains that I didn’t give them a fair grade, that would be a situation I don’t want to be in. However, I do want to make them feel like they can come and talk to me if they do have a question.

The last situation, if a student comes to me worried that they won’t graduate because they’re failing my class. In my opinion, this would literally be worst-case scenario. On one hand, I don’t want to be the kind of teacher that just hands out grades to students who are undeserving. However, I also think that a student shouldn’t be kept from getting a diploma just because of one class. What do you do in this situation? I have some ideas, but when I am actually in that situation for the first time, I’d bet that my ideas will probably change.

Anyway, these are just a few of my future grading-related fears. I hope I’m not the only one, but if I am, that’s good for everyone else.