Something Funny
Here’s a funny article for you. It’s called “The Different Kinds of People That There Are.” I laughed the most at the absurd parts. It is not accurate, just funny. You should read it. Really!
I need to laugh, because otherwise I’ll just be dwelling on the fact that I am supposed to be turning my dissertation into a book and have actually claimed to be doing so already in about 50 job applications this past year.
Hey, Lady
If you ever really want to get students riled up, have them read “The Common Guy” by Audrey Bilger from Bitch magazine. The article is about the use of the phrase “you guys” when talking to a group, whether the group is all female or not. The argument goes that this is a perpetuation of the way masculine=generic/”ungendered” (such as the old “man” for “human”), and that it’s become so pervasive that it’s nearly impossible to stop. Wow, students do not like this argument. “What’s the big deal?” they ask. “She’s making too much out of nothing. I’m not sexist, and I say ‘you guys’ all the time. It’s not offensive; it’s just a casual way of speaking.” You get the drift.
Now, I myself am guilty of using “you guys” all the time, so I’m definitely not trying to say I’m a less sexist speaker than anyone else. In fact, one of the schools I teach at is a women’s college, and I still say “you guys” to the group. This doesn’t mean I’m not bothered by it; personally, I agree with Bilger’s argument. It shows how pervasive sexism really is, and how extremely difficult it is to purge from language.
One of the ways you can tell “you guys” is (arguably) sexist is that while two women might be referred to as “you guys,” one woman would never be called a guy, while one man would be. This leads me to my next question: what, if anything, is the female equivalent of “guy”?
My husband says that equivalent is “lady.” I discovered this recently when I was teasing him for using the word “lady” so much. Every time he refers to a woman, he says “lady” instead, as in: “I’m going to meet with this lady from work today.” He claims that “lady” is a casual term, much less formal than “woman.” My assumption, though he will not confirm this, is that he uses “lady” because “girl” (which is, in my opinion, the closest equivalent to “guy”) is insulting to females over the age of about 18.
I find the idea that “lady” could be a casual term hilarious, and this has resulting in a number of laughingly passionate debates between us on the matter. (Please understand, this is really all in good fun.) For the sake of argument, I called “lady” a derogatory term, which he thinks is absolutely absurd. He says I have held on to a notion of the word “lady” from “those old books” I read, and that the term has changed. I stand by my belief that “lady” only has negative connotations, most of which surround the idea that women are weaker and less human than men. Here are the ways I believe the word “lady” is used today:
1) To refer to a woman who is assumed to be physically feeble (as in: “I helped a little old lady across the street”).
2) In place of the word “bitch” if you are angry at a woman (as in: “Hey, lady, get out of my way!”)
3) To refer to a woman who needs rescuing (as in Lionel Richie’s song “Lady,” or in the hotel situation in Gainsville where “so many ladies” needed a taxi — only Amy knows what I’m talking about here).
4) Used by a man, usually in a rap song, to refer to a group of women, probably as a nicer version of ”bitches” or “hoes” (as in the song “Hey Ya,” where women are addressed as “ladies” and men as “fellas”)
5) Similarly to 4, used by a woman to refer to her female friends (as in the Beyonce song “All the Single Ladies,” in which she tells male listeners, “if you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it,” a lyric that makes me a little sick every time I hear it).
4 and 5, I think, are the reasons “ladies” is seen as an equivalent to “guys,” because it’s used that way and it’s supposed to be a nice way of referring to women, especially a woman’s female friends. However, to me, perhaps because these references are often used in songs, I still think of these “ladies” as women who wear makeup and high heels and have manicured nails. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s not the same as a “guy,” who hangs out in sneakers and jeans. Guys are comfortable, while ladies are pretty. Not only that, but those “ladies” will become “bitches” at the drop of a baseball cap if they do something their boyfriends don’t like.
The trouble is, I really can’t think of an equivalent term to “guy.” Ladies are too fussy for me, but girls are too young. Both terms take away some element of humanity and dignity to me. “Woman” is the only term that doesn’t, but it’s true that it doesn’t sound casual — you would never address a crowd as “guys and women.”
Any thoughts? Oh, and before you suggest using a new word, don’t forget how hard Sarah Silverman tried to come up with a new word — or how dangerous language can be!
A few notes for the end of the semester: tough love edition
1. If you haven’t gotten an A on any of your assignments, why would you think you can still get an A in the class now? And, uh, don’t tell me you will work harder on your final paper if you have a chance at an A; that will not persuade me to tell you there’s a chance at one. Also, if you’ve gotten Cs on almost everything and I’ve reluctantly told you the best you might be able to pull off is a B, why would you try to talk me into a B+? It’s not a negotiation.
2. Dropping your mother off at the airport and picking up your sister at the train station are not valid excuses for missing class.
3. No, I’m not coming in on Thursday. Yes, I feel a little guilty about it, but you’ve had all semester to come see me and you haven’t, so you can go to the writing center now. Plus I don’t feel like making a two-hour trip in so that you can not show up for the appointment we made. I will be taking a breather before grading 60 papers and calculating final grades, thanks.
4. No, I can’t “give your paper a read” if you email it to me before it’s turned in. I already read your draft. Now you need to take charge!
PS: It is hot as hell in my office — no AC — and my business school students are wearing cologne in honor of their final presentations, which is making me choke.
What do we grade when we grade participation?
Finally, my long-awaited post on participation. I know you’ve been waiting with bated breath.
Let me start with this. Here are two contradictory statements, both of which I believe:
1) Students who do not speak in class are often contemplative learners who have difficulty speaking on the fly and therefore should be graded only on their written work.
2) Shy students who do not speak in class should be expected to contribute verbally in class, because they often fall back on their shyness as an excuse not to push themselves out of their comfort zones.
Part of the reason why I believe both of these statements is because I am a shy person myself and feel both of these things about myself. It’s slightly amusing that I am in a teaching position, because of the obvious fact that it requires speaking in public, but usually when my position is clear (i.e. when I am the one in charge), I don’t have a particular problem. However, leading discussion has been the hardest part of my teaching performance and something I’ve only recently felt I’ve become good at. This is because it’s not exactly speaking in front of people that’s the problem; it’s having that spontaneous conversation part. I tend to be contemplative rather than spontaneous, so inserting myself into conversations is hard for me (though, as I say, in the teaching environment I have improved on this).
I mention all this because I completely understand what my quiet students are experiencing. Ok, there are always quiet students who are quiet because they didn’t do the reading. But many of them are contemplative; they prefer listening to speaking, and then writing once they’ve thought about it some more.
I don’t know if I’m just forgetting something, but I do not remember being graded on participation when I was an undergraduate. Now, it could be that some of my B grades were a result of my never, NEVER speaking in class and I just somehow wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I didn’t read the syllabus closely, or maybe we were being judged by some professors on our participation but weren’t being told. (Or, you know, maybe my papers weren’t A quality. I’m not proud.) The thing is, I really don’t know, and I really don’t remember being told either overtly or covertly that verbal contributions were expected or required for our grade (even though we did have discussions), and I don’t remember ever speaking in class (though maybe I said something once in a great while by the time I was a junior or senior).
So is it hypocritical that I often get frustrated with the students in my classes who just will not speak, no matter what I do? That sometimes I secretly think of them as stubborn or even lazy because they don’t seem to even try to speak up? Or is it me recognizing something about myself?
I have this one student, M. She is one of the ones who has really been making me think about this. She never speaks in class, not even in small groups. I can’t remember her ever talking to me after class. She made an impression on me at the beginning of the semester because, for the first (ungraded, short, personal) essay, she wrote about a particular cult TV show I happen to love, and I gushed in her paper about how she could write her research paper on it. Now, this must have made some sort of impression, because she did end up writing her research paper on this. But when I read and responded to that first short essay, I thought, “oh, I’m going to have some connection with this girl.” You know? But then she fell off the radar. Honestly, I kinda forgot about her. Until her first formal essay, which knocked my socks off. Then I looked at her in class one day while she was doing some freewriting I asked everyone to do, and I knew watching her that she was freewriting about this TV show we both like (since this was a freewrite about the research paper), and I thought, “This girl is me. This is who I was at 18.” She never talks. She doesn’t seem to socialize with the others in the class. She is clearly engaged, does all of the reading, is consistently attentive, has never missed or even been late to a single class, has worked really hard on her research, and is a thoughtful and articulate writer. And yet, despite the fact that I honestly think of her as “me at 18,” I have failed to forge a relationship with her (beyond any kind of influence I may have had on her that I don’t know about). And honestly, it’s because I have 59 other students to think about, many who are openly demanding of my attention. This makes me sad, and yet I know my own limitations.
Wow, this has turned into something I didn’t mean it to be, and yet I don’t feel like editing or changing it.
What I really meant to address here is: what do we grade when we grade participation? Why do we have a participation grade? What does it really mean?
Despite the fact that I do not remember ever saying a word in my undergraduate classes, when I starting teaching and creating syllabi, I didn’t really question the idea of making participation part of the grade. The idea is to encourage verbal participation and reward students for contributing in class. Sounds good, right?
But it has led to a lot of questions for me. How do we truly gauge participation? What do we do about students who are so excited about the material that they inadvertently dominate the conversation? (I’m not talking about blowhards who won’t shut up — those present their own problems — but rather good, excited students.) What about the students who are excellent, thoughtful writers who are clearly paying attention but can’t find it in themselves to speak up?
Before people start giving me ideas about how to encourage participation, please know that I do A LOT of activities designed to encourage participation, and I also give students plenty of opportunities to explore their ideas in small groups instead of having to speak in front of the whole class (even though the class itself, at 20 students, is already a fairly small group). I often explain that quiet students should take the opportunity to report small-group activities, to give them a chance to speak in class. But the real truth is that these activities rarely carry over into the whole-group experience. Plus, to be honest, if the extent of a student’s whole-group participation is to report on their small-group activity, I’m not all that likely to remember that as participation.
I have also done lots of activities where we all go around the room and everyone is forced to say at least one thing (that is, they report on something they just wrote about, or they have to pick out a passage they find important, etc). I believe in this as an important activity. But if someone speaks in a situation where she’s being forced to speak, is that really participating? (I suppose she could refuse, but usually even students who haven’t done the reading scramble to find something to say in order to avoid embarrassment.) This mild forcing is good for getting voices out there, but again, in my experience it has rarely translated into any change in an individual student’s behavior. Is this really “participating”?
Look, I know I’m a very encouraging and pretty unintimidating teacher who thinks a LOT about changing things up and doing pretty much everything I can do to get conversation going. And I achieve that — it’s just that usually, it’s the same students conversing.
In my experience, student behavior in this regard rarely changes over the course of the semester. Unlike writing — which, let’s be honest, also rarely undergoes a significant transformation over the course of a single semester, but in which I can often see some improvements — I have very rarely seen a student really come out of her shell and speak more in a full-group situation (although I’m willing to admit that this could be a failure of my own observation skills).
So what are we grading when we grade participation? Some students just find speaking in class to be easier than others do — should they automatically be rewarded for doing something that comes easily to them? Yet what would our classes be without the ones who are always willing to rescue a flailing conversation, the ones we rely on to at least attempt articulating a half-formed thought? If those students are better at oral than written communication, then shouldn’t they get some reward for that? I have a colleague that takes what he calls “active listening” into consideration in the participation grade, and part of “active listening” is thoughtful writing in a journal. But I have response papers — which is a separate grade. Should I be assessing the student before AND after class discussion? And really, isn’t pretty much everyone earning an A at that point (unless they’re really just messing up — in which case, they’ll be getting a lower grade anyway)?
Plus the actual grading is pretty bogus. Most instructors admit that they don’t grade participation harshly. I have a clear outline in my syllabus about what constitutes each grade in terms of participation, yet the truth is that I usually am softer on it than what I outline. If a student never speaks in class, shouldn’t they get an F? Isn’t that the equivalent of not turning in a paper? And yet, I’ve only once given below a C in participation (it was a very special case), and a C is itself a rare occurrance. If I don’t see it as something that should be judged on the criteria I myself have laid out, then why am I grading it?
I suppose one potential reason to have a participation grade is that you can have some way of reacting to students who are openly disruptive in the class, but if I’m going to be honest about it, I have a hard time using that as well. What grade do you get for being an asshole? B because at least you were engaged in some way? C because you weren’t engaged in a meaningful way? D because you disrupted the learning of others? And if you get a C or a D, will you be banging down my door demanding that I prove or justify this grade? I always feel like I’m being vindictive if I assign lower than a B for a pain-in-the-butt student.
Part of me wants to stop grading participation in writing classes (literature classes might be different?). Verbal contributions should simply be expected as a requirement of the course. After all, the students who find it easy to talk in class aren’t going to stop doing it because it’s not graded, and it wouldn’t change anything about how I conduct the class. But I hesitate — maybe those students who are better at oral than written communication should get some kind of reward, and maybe students who can’t or won’t stretch themselves in this regard should feel negative consequences. I really can’t decide.
Any thoughts?
Back to the Drawing Board?
I promised a post on participation, and it’s definitely on its way. But I had a really depressing experience the other day in class and wondered if anyone had any thoughts on it.
I have resisted for a number of years using plagiarism-checking software because it felt too big-brother to me, and because I felt like using it sends the message that I expect students to cheat. Then, at one of my schools, I ended up having six instances of some form of plagiarism out of 40 papers (these were not research papers). This is what they were, so that we can be specific:
1. In a draft, two uncited (and directly lifted) paragraphs from Wikipedia
2. One student bizarrely handed in, instead of a draft, three pages in which he had copied and repeatedly pasted the same few paragraphs from a NYTimes article on his topic. He TOLD me that’s what it was — so obviously he wasn’t trying to pull one over on me, but how bizarre. I guess he thought it was better to hand something in for the draft instead of nothing?
3. In the final paper, some uncited references to the past that couldn’t have come from the student but which I couldn’t exactly PROVE was plagiarized.
4. In the final paper, another bizarre one: only the introductory paragraphy, lifted directly from an online essay (the rest of the essay was original).
5. In the final paper, a lot of uncited, directly lifted material from several online sources, interspersed with the author’s own writing.
6. In the final paper, the uncited use of an online essay to structure the argument the student was making, and a considerable amount of direct lifting of wording.
Now, I worked with these students in various ways on why what they did was not acceptable and made them re-write their work, etc. This is not the focus of this post. It’s that I think the internet is making it easier for students to plagiarize and changing the way students think about writing. This is a much bigger issue than I can address right now, but for various reasons, I finally became convinced that I shouldn’t be spending so much time googling random phrases from my students’ papers and instead should just use the damn service the school provides so that plagiarism is caught before they can turn in the final draft.
So what happens after I explain in class how to use the software and how it is intended to help them catch unintentional plagiarism themselves so they can correct it before the final draft? One of my favorite students raises his hand and says he finds this imprisoning, that it violates his rights as a student, and that it should only be used if I suspect someone of plagiarizing, because otherwise it seems like I’m suspecting everyone.
Exactly my problem with it in the first place.
I almost cried.
Because googling every paper I suspect of plagiarism is adding so much work to my already heavy load. And if I don’t do it, too many students are going to get away with plagiarizing. So hello, I’m already being Big Brother; you just didn’t know it before. But how do I reconcile this with my desire NOT to be seen as Big Brother? Or should I just hang it up and just grade the plagiarized papers as though they weren’t plagiarized?
Ugh! I was feeling so good about this decision before class.
“Now, where did I put my pair of glasses that are fake and make me look smarter than I am?”
I am planning a post on participation grades. In preparation, please watch the following video, which I will comment on in a moment. It’s a little long, but highly entertaining, and you can stop watching BEFORE the “blooper” reel, despite the student’s insistence that you watch it, because it’s basically just him cracking up uncontrollably.
Liking the Research Paper
I have learned to like — maybe even love a little bit — teaching the research paper.
This is an unusual statement, I think, from a writing teacher. Most of us dislike the research paper, and I did, too, for a long time. Why? I suspect many teachers dislike it because of the issue of plagiarism, but since the internet has made plagiarism so easy, I’m finding too much of it in my students’ regular essays as well, so this doesn’t make the research paper particularly different. I know that one of the main reasons I disliked the research paper is because when I began teaching it, I never felt I had enough time to teach it properly due to the structure of the college where I worked. Finally, the final product of a research assignment often results in uninspired topics and writing, which makes grading at the end of the semester particularly dull.
So why do I now enjoy the research paper? There are a number of reasons, probably none of them much more important than the others. Here I am going to attempt to document the elements I think are necessary for an enjoyable experience with the research paper.
1. Leave enough time to teach the research paper properly. Although I just said no element was more important than the others, I do think this is the most important. However, unfortunately, it’s also the one that we have the least amount of control over, due to our schools’ expectations about how many essays our students produce over the course of a semester. I have been lucky enough this year to work at two schools that have a specific agenda for the first-year writing sequence: first semester there is no (or very little) research, while second semester focuses primarily on research. Although this does mean that students generally only write one research paper in their first-year writing courses, it takes some pressure off both the students and the professor by making sure there is enough time to go through each step of the research process thoroughly at least once (instead of half-assed twice, which is how my former college was structured). According to The Curious Researcher (to be discussed in a moment), it takes at least five weeks to write a research paper. I allot longer when possible. This sends the message that researching itself is a vital and time-consuming process, just like writing is.
2. Use The Curious Researcher or Beyond Notecards by Bruce Ballenger. Both of these books aim to teach students (and teachers) that the research essay is about being intellectually curious, but it also approaches this idea from the perspective of knowing that the research paper intimidates most people.
3. Do not assign additional readings while teaching the research paper; instead, build class activities around the research process. Make it really clear — repeatedly clear — to students that the readings for the class once the research paper begins is their own research, and that’s part of the reason there’s no excuse for them to limit their research to Google. I use classroom exercises from The Curious Researcher, as well as a few of my own, to show students what I expect them to be doing while researching, taking notes, and writing.
4. Allow plenty of time for students to choose their topics, and repeatedly encourage both creativity and personal interest in their choices. Yes, you’ll still get some boring topics, but by having students do exercises to try to find things that interest them, that (when appropriate) they have some personal connection to, and that are creative or deeper than just a “report,” they actually will usually try to find a personal take on the topic. When they do find a personal take, it usually does show in their writing. This seems obvious, but often they are just out of high school having never written about something they had personal knowledge of, or having never done research deeper than a simplistic report — and certainly never having written 10 pages on a single topic! Many of them have to be told numerous times that they can use their own experience and opinions before they will believe it.
5. Look at the researcher paper as a learning opportunity for you. Have you ever wondered about human cloning, or jetpacks, or Bollywood films, or the effects of technology on human communication — but never had time to do research on it yourself? Assign research papers! Ok, yes, your knowledge will still be limited. And maybe you already know as much as the student knew by the end of the research process. But what actually made me realize that I was starting to enjoy teaching the research essay was when I discovered I was actually learning some information — either on a topic I hadn’t thought about, or new developments I hadn’t encountered yet. My students’ papers can actually incite intellectual curiosity in me as well — especially if I can somehow guide them towards a creative topic.
6. Give short assignments that break research into steps, emphasizing process. It’s really important to guide students step by step through the process of researching, and this means a lot more than just taking them to the library once or twice. Make them actually provide proof of their research process–and grade it, even if it’s a low-stakes grade. Many people do proposals and annotated bibliographies, which are very helpful, but I also have the students do steps in between, such as turning in lists of the books they have found about their topic and doing an in-depth analysis of one of their sources. (This technique was given to me by my friend Amy, whose last name I cannot give if I am to retain my own anonymity. Thanks, Amy!)
7. Emphasize many different ways in which the research paper is simply an extension of, rather than a departure from, their previous analytical work. With luck, this will help keep them away from the stilted language that a research paper sometimes leads to. Creative writing exercises done in conjunction with the research process can also help with this. For example, an exercise from The Curious Researcher that always produces great results is having students write three different openings to their papers (I do this in class, but you wouldn’t have to). It opens their minds to the idea that there’s more than one possible way to approach writing and research.
8. Approach the question of plagiarism from the perspective of their development as a writer and scholar. This one is probably the trickiest, and one that has been written about in interesting ways lately. I have recently decided to start using Safe Assign (similar to Turn It In). This is partially in order to reduce intentional plagiarism, but also to help students better understand how to put things in their own words. If you really think back on it, there was a time in your life (whether in high school or college) when you truly did not understand how to put things in your own words. I remember being in high school and thinking that all I had to do was change a few words; this was not out of laziness, but ignorance. Having frank conversations with students about that difficulty helps, as does in-class writing that forces them to do it. (If you can put three or four group-generated paraphrases on the board based on the same passage, you can easily prove to them that there is definitely more than one way to say something!) In addition, instead of using scare tactics such as how they’re going to be expelled if they get caught plagiarizing, try emphasizing all they have to gain from avoiding it: they get to “show off” how much they’ve read and understand, they get to introduce original ideas, they get to pay homage to writers they respect and enter into a conversation with those great thinkers. If you ask them, students themselves can come up with these angles on why plagiarism isn’t beneficial to them. If they hear their peers say it, hopefully they will internalize it. This has the potential for making the whole discussion less repugnant to everyone involved.
9. Keep the page count as low as you can. Often schools have required page counts, but do what you can. If it calls for 10-15 pages, make sure they know they can still earn an A with 10 pages. It’s important for students to be able to write long essays, but 8-10 pages is usually quite enough of a challenge and struggle for them, and in my opinion making it longer than that achieves very little.
10. Have the students do presentations at the end of the semester. Students actually do like hearing about what their peers have been working on all this time — and you get to rest a little before doing all that grading!
It’s been my experience that students are becoming more and more interested in the research paper. I think this is because they are already used to doing low-level research all the time — they can go on the internet and easily find out what Beyonce wore to the Oscars or what the temperature is like in Guam or what people thought of the Battlestar Galactica finale. Banking on — and expanding on — that low-level interest by trying to deepen and broaden it is part of what can make the process more fun for you as well as for them. I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this!
Buried. Under. Papers.
Currently I am swamped with work. I am grading 40 papers now, and 20 more come in this week, plus I’m doing some fairly involved volunteer work. But I have a few posts in mind for when I come up for air. The first one will be on enjoying the research paper. But it won’t be up for a few weeks. Not that anyone is still reading this.
Funny.
The relentless pessimism and bitterness of Rate Your Students sometimes gets to me, but I can’t help it: this post is hilarious (and short). Check it out.
Grading and Academic Freedom: Denis Rancourt
Reading around today, I came across the story of Denis Rancourt, a physics professor and self-proclaimed anarchist who was recently escorted off the campus of the University of Ottawa and banned from returning, despite his tenure (they are in the process of trying to fire him, essentially). The reason for his dismissal is that he “arbitrarily” assigned grades to his class; specifically, he apparently told his senior-level and masters-level physics students on the first day of class that everyone would receive an A+. (I think it’s the icing on the cake that he assigned A+ instead of A, since in my opinion an A+ is not a grade.)
Rancourt has been both applauded and vilified for his actions. He also, I should mention, has been in trouble with the administration on numerous occasions for such things as blowing off meetings and openly disregarding other policies. So it’s not like he’s beloved by the university in the first place; his situation comes in the context of a career of being a trouble-maker. Some see him as a hero — and apparently he’s more popular with students than with his colleagues — while others accuse him of not fulfilling his contracted obligations as a faculty member.
In an interview with Canadian progressive website rabble.ca, Rancourt explains why he is resistant to grading:
With grades students learn to guess the professor’s mind and to obey. It is a very sophisticated machinery, whereby the natural desire to learn, the intrinsic motivation to want to learn something because you are interested in the thing itself, is destroyed. Grades are the carrot and stick that shape obedient employees and that prepare students for the higher level indoctrinations of graduate and professional schools. The only way to develop independent thinking in the classroom is to give freedom, to break the power relationship by removing the instrument of power.
Now, ok, to be honest, Rancourt’s rhetoric makes me think he’s either thrilling to know or incredibly boring — that is, either he inspires you to listen, or you wish he’d stop always harping on the same policies that will never change. I’m sure he’s probably a pain in the butt if you know him in real life. But fundamentally, I agree with what he’s saying. I think grades really do distract students from learning and teach them to be good, obedient servants to the system.
One of the things that’s overlooked in the accounts I’ve read is the fact that he only assigned these grades to upper-level courses, and the grading in graduate courses are arguably even more absurd than grading in undergrad classes. In my PhD program, for instance, students generally got one of three grades: A, A-, or B+. Getting a “B” was tantamount to failing, and a B+ was considered a serious warning. If there are only really two or three grades to choose from, why bother? What slim and arbitrary standards are you using to distinguish the A students from the A- ones? And if the vast majority of the students are receiving As and A-s, how is that different from what Rancourt did by giving everyone an A+?
I know the answer of course: it’s the fact that he told them ahead of time. (Well, arguably there’s more to it than that, but this is where he can’t claim they just all did such a good job.) He told them so they wouldn’t be worried about the grade, and could just be there to learn. But according to supporters of grading, he took away the element of competition that would make the students strive to work hard. Part of me gets that, but at the same time, he didn’t tell this to a group of first-year students.
I don’t know. Part of me wishes I had the guts Rancourt has. But to be honest, I myself am too much of a goody-goody rule-following servant to the system to imagine doing something so radical. Plenty more about Rancourt can be found here and here. (Incidentally, he used to just give pass/fail grades until the university stopped allowing it.)
What do you think?
