The myth of zero
I was the proverbial “fly on the wall” this morning, sitting in on a workshop for teachers. My actual role involved running a low-fi video camera to capture the effort for posterity, but since my selective deafness isn’t always controlled I also happened to be a passive listener. Interesting stuff.
The focus was on professional learning communities which is a buzz term that didn’t make it into my B.Ed. program. The idea is that if you are surrounded by other trained educators, you should share a little of the “magic”; apply a quick stir of the Gestalt wand and everybody wins.
As the presentation came to an end, with the analogy that we were now in May without having completed the curriculum (teachers understand this sort of thinking, believe me), the speaker mentioned the “myth of zero”. Society won’t accept that students are learning all the time; we must have measurable progress which involves evaluation. If you evaluate, there must be a scale. At one end of the scale is success, with a maximum score. At the other end: zero.
Now here’s the rub. It is impossible to learn nothing from a given situation. Students are trained to do “survival math” from the beginning of their contact with the educational world. They do understand marking schemes and weighting and requirements. Now, extend the proverbial ten foot pole a little bit. What about the student that has low test scores during the early part of a year? The student figures out (long before the teacher in many cases) that there is not possible way of completing the marking period with success. Guess what you’ve just added to your classroom.
Evaluation is not simple. Neither is retreat from that quagmire of low marks that some students invest. Perhaps we need to rethink this whole grade process. And no, I don’t have the answer. I simply accept that a situation where no learning has taken place is probably the stuff of fairytales. Hence, the myth of zero.
