F or as long as I can remember I’ve never been a fan of traditional grading in school. Obviously there needs to be some way to quantify what a student is learning, if the information is being retained and if the student can apply what they learned to a real-life application. But is boiling a student’s knowledge on a particular subject to one number, one grade actually painting the entire picture? I don’t think it is.
The flaw with that logic is there really isn’t a way in school to see if a student can apply their learned knowledge to their actual life. There are countless examples of students who excel — or supposedly excel — and make great grades but struggle to make it in the real world. The opposite is also true. There are just as many people who never did well in school that end up thriving in the society we’ve created.
What it all comes back to is humankind’s insistence on making the universe’s unfathomable scale into something that is easily digestible for the masses. Could you honestly say that our world is governed by the strict laws of mathematics as scientists suggest? Or are they just trying to find the easiest possible way to make something so extraordinarily complex and unbelievable into something simple and understandable?
Do you know who came up with the concept of numbers in the first place or how the first equation was even formed? How do we know they were even correct to begin with? Couldn’t it also be possible that some of the first revelations weren’t actually revelations to begin but were in fact just a way to, as I said before, make the universe’s unfathomable scale into something that is easily digestible?
Doesn’t the fact that so many answers to mathematical questions have an infinite amount of repeating numbers to the point where there actually is no true answer suggest that the concept of numbers and mathematics is flawed? So why would we put numbers to students to explain their progress when numbers themselves are inherently flawed?
I couldn’t tell you how many things I learned in school and college that turned out to be absolutely pointless in my adult life. From all of the calculus and trigonometry to the prerequisite courses at Southern Miss, there’s so many things I learned that turned out to be a waste of time.
Yet there were so many things I didn’t learn in school that I wished I had that would’ve been far more useful in my everyday life. The first being finances. The only thing I was taught in school about finances was how to write a check and balance a checkbook. But the only thing I use physical checks for is to pay my rent.
I wasn’t taught about how accepting student loan money would cripple me financially and follow me around for a long time. I wasn’t taught how to make a budget or how important it is to stick to it and practice smart financial practices. The point comes back to that if you start with a flawed system in the beginning, everything that comes after will likely be flawed.
I can understand using a traditional grading scale through elementary and junior high school because you’re a laying a foundation of knowledge. But by the time a student reaches high school, which is far and away the most influential time in a person’s life before they’re asked to live on their own, what they learn and how they are graded should come back to real-life experiences, not numbers. Getting a 95 on an exam in physics isn’t as beneficial as learning about things that would make someone a productive citizen in society.
Mississippi’s scale for students to graduate is flawed enough in its own right, but when you couple it with the absence of life skills it’s a recipe for disaster.
Joshua Campbell is sports editor of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him via email at joshuacampbell@columbianprogress.com or call (601) 736-2611.
