B+ is no longer good enough
I spent today as a student. In-service training for me, so that I can provide in-service training to many others. The topic for today’s lesson was report cards.
In my day, the teacher took great pride in inking the mark I had earned onto paper, so that I could bring it home for a parental pep talk. You can do better than this! Ink so that I couldn’t adjust my marks (upward).
How times have changed. We now record marks on a computer, so that another computer can transmit the mark to yet another computer, and so that a printer can reduce the need for fountain pens in the environment.
At the same time, a reform, a wind of change, a renewal of the evaluation process is underway, and the reporting methodology is changing. No more will a row of neat figures approaching 100 bear witness. B+ is no longer good enough.
Instead, Dick and Jane will get feedback on how they’ve done on a series of objectives. Sort of like pass/fail, except that nobody can fail. No, really. As you can imagine, this newfound optimism in the educational sector requires new terms, and today was more of a lesson in Newspeak than anything else.
Of course, since each area of the curriculum is unique, the objectives, while the same, are not the same. The terms used will protect the innocent. The report card, on the other hand, will now require that all teachers return to the other side of the lectern, to become familiar with the new vocabulary. The report card has newly drawn boundaries, and I get the feeling that completing the new form is going to give us all reason to pause and reflect on just how complicated something simple can be if one puts their mind to it.
Wish me/us luck, because the report cards still have to be completed before the end of the year.
