I teach CS at the college level, so I’m closer to Dan in content; I think the fact that there are right and wrong answers (although they may be more than one right answer) in our area colors our thinking greatly.

I agree with Dan’s ideals; the *final* grade should reflect only mastery of the material (knowledge); I seldom *explicitly* reward effort. However, effort normally leads to mastery, so I reward the obvious *consequence* of that effort.

Thanks!

And this is precisely my point, it occurs to me. If I were Dan’s kid, running into class with a bloody scrape on my face and shaking, he would let me get a drink to drop my cortisol levels. I know he would. And I would come back and focus and do OK, because Dan, to use his own words, wants to “remove that which impedes my effort from elevating my grade,” and this is commendable.

But it is not objective. Nor it is emotionless. Compassion never is.

But Dan, as per his Faculty Room post, wants us to believe something else: that he “derives his grades from what a student knows and little else.” Yet here, he admits that effort, however directly or indirectly, factors in significantly. Indeed from every comment he’s made in this string, including his wholesale agreement about what happens to your theoretical kids A-D, this pure-as-the-driven-content-mastery assertion is false.

It’s false, but it is not the *problem*. Please understand that I’m not actually disagreeing with the way Dan grades. I mean, I could argue some larger points about needing to teach and evaluate kids as citizens and ethical beings, and yes, what to do with the type B student thing is a problem for me. But really, from all appearances, Dan’s system is overall commendable, responsible, and accurate.

What is objectionable to me is this: also per his FR post, Dan wants to cram inerrantly necessary daily evaluative decisions of compassion–decisions that do not *excuse* children’s effort levels, but *actualize* them– into this box labeled “emotional”,“subjective”, and therefore, “lousy”, for every teacher except, apparently, himself. And I just can’t get with that.

Dan, if this is not what you intend, or not what you are criticizing in other teachers, then I urge you to please get clear about that in your language, instead of encouraging false dichotomies that are designed to pitch your pedagogy as above reproach, several of which are floating around this blog today. I urge you to do this not leastways because of this fact: such design is unnecessary to justify your brilliance. I mean that.

But I’ve realized right about now that although I brought this to bear on the original weak/strong post, I’ve veered off quite a long ways elsewhere. (And anyway, Chris Lehmann has made this argument to Dan before, and better.) So I think the bell to indicate the end of the round has rung.

A math teacher who wants effort to significantly affect the grade permits retests, tests on predictable and clearly defined skills, lets the best score count, and makes it possible to retest until perfect scores are achieved. A math teacher who values brilliance over effort includes some tricky, surprising problems on tests to make sure that only the smartest students net an A, and may insist on averaging scores after retesting so that the grade “remembers” that a student once did not know. The former system rewards students of type C, but may make things too easy for students of type B — but on the other hand, with such a system student B is quickly passed on to a level where effort is actually necessary to pass. What am I leaving out?

Different dictionaries is probably accurate, which is why I threw Ms. Newman at you. Using the most common schema, can we ask, again, why her quarterly evaluation, which awards points in a discrete category called “effort,” is any different from yours, in which you simply subsume the same award into subcategories such as partial credit and verbal praise? (Verbal praise of effort, by the way, being empirically demonstrated to have as much, if not more, objective evaluative effect than grades?)

I’m not asking a leading question here– I really want to know what you perceive that difference to be.

And I also want to acknowledge that we’re probably never going to meet on whether “subjectivity”– whatever that actually means to you– has its place in a classroom. I’ve got the New York State Teacher of 2008 on my side with that one, but you know. Whatever. :)

I also

In math, you either arrived at the right destination or you didn’t. If a student shed some beautiful tears along the way and took a problem down an interesting rabbit trail then I award partial credit and verbally complement the creativity, but that alone won’t promote her on to cooler and more complicated courses of study.

The best I can do, then, is remove that which impedes her effort from elevating her grade while at the same time remaining true to the convictions I’ve outlined ad nauseum here, there, and everywhere.

This feels like we’re debating from different dictionaries. I don’t mind, but if the room starts to spin on you, no hard feelings for tapping out.