October 15 - Entrance Slip

I would like to preface this entry with the fact that my views might be too idealistic and they could change once I get more teaching experience.

1) I would prefer to not have grades, in an ideal world. From a teacher's perspective is just extra time taken out of actual learning. From a student's perspective it's a lot of stress, and make your motivation become extrinsic, as the article suggested. Grades indicate some sort of arbitrary performance, at a specific time. There are plenty of mathematicians who weren't seen as "bright" students, and performance on a test is not indicative of future accomplishments. My belief is that persistence and liking what you're doing go a long way. The purpose of grades is therefore to just say X is better than Y, and he will get into university A and Y will get into university B. Humans are creatures of incentive, therefore, grades can provide the incentive to study. Sometimes it's hard to intrinsically motivate, since classes are huge and it's hard to get to everyone personally and convince them why they should study. The negative aspects were discussed in the articles and I won't go into detail about them since I agree with their points.

2) Some unintended side effects of grading would be the students focusing on the grades rather than the subject. This would be a classic case of the ends becoming the means. Grades can have an impact on social situations since they provide a scale. This scale, can be interpreted in such a way that some students now think they are dumber because they have 85% compared to someone who has an 86% when in fact there might not be any difference in skill.

3) I always imagined teaching math without giving grades. Kind of like an art class. You're there to learn and to explore and to create and you have fun. A teacher can encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading by being enthusiastic and providing the "why" of what he is teaching. It's a hard thing to do, but he has to motivate the students so that their discipline from learning comes from within.