"I'm Always Angry" - Reflections on Grading
There's a moment in the movie Avengers when an alien spaceship is laying waste to the skyscrapers of New York City, terrorizing the city and establishing a beachhead for intergalactic alien conquest of Earth. The Avengers need reinforcements and Captain America says to Bruce Banner, "Now might be a good time to get angry." Any time I'm in a conversation about grading, I feel like Bruce Banner as he walks toward the spaceship and says over his shoulder, "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry." Grading is an existential topic for me, professionally. It's the very symbolic and very public communicating to all interested parties the relative value of a student that pisses me off. Grading, as we traditionally know it, is about assigning a "value" to kids that includes all the ways our economic schema, unconscious and not, has perverted our understanding of relational priorities. Think about it this way: Getting a student to produce ...