Grade Junkie Rehab: Benefit versus Credit

GRADE JUNKIE REHAB

           Student writer Orella Chichester remarked, “I’m tired of writing papers for the way teachers will grade them.”  Another student, Arianne Andrew phrased it as “I’m tired of writing papers so that teachers will have something to grade.”  Yet how many times has a student fairly accosted me terrified that they received an A- instead of an A on an essay?  How many times have you, as a student, focused more on a grade than what you were or could be learning?

           

            Especially in our capitalist economies, grades are money.  Just as payment results in a credit to your bank account, grades are credits in your academic bank account.  Just as you earn money, you earn grades.  Just as money is numerical and digitizable, so, too are grades.  Let us make a distinction, though, between what is a benefit to us and what merely earns us credit. Consider these definitions and word origins:

Benefit: advantage; a gift; a public performance for a charitable cause.  From the Latin ‘to do good’.  Used as “Benefit of clergy,” “Benefit of the doubt,” “For the benefit of the community”

Credit: delay of monetary payment, money submitted, acknowledgment/praise of contribution, belief in.  Used as “credit where credit is due,” “give someone credit for,” “credit for actions.” From the Latin ‘to believe in or to trust.’

            When I was an undergraduate, I went through some difficult semesters—dysfunctional family, relationship crazies, financial challenges.  Instead of reading Poe’s “The Raven,” for my American Literature class, I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince—a book I needed to shore up my psychic energy and come home to myself.  I walked into the exam for that class, sat down to questions I couldn’t answer, and asked the professor if we could talk outside.  I told him that I was unprepared and that it would be dishonest for me to respond to the exam as if I were.  He thanked me for my frankness, that he was glad that I had read what I needed to read, and said that he would just issue me a “C” for the test.  That was a gift to me, a benefit. That’s the best grade response I’ve ever had—beyond my hundreds of “A’s.”  I was focused on what would benefit me, and not for chasing a grade for credit.  I have and continue to develop a successful career as a professor, writer, and performer—in great part because my professor stepped out the numbers game and acknowledged that I had taken care to read what would benefit me.

            I now say to students “Let what we are doing in this class be so important and beneficial to you that you would accept a 'C,' rather than drop.”  The irony is, of course, that the more we focus on substance, learning, exploration, growing, the more likely we are, in the end, to earn the “A,” but the “A” and the hope of it no longer traps us—so that we can’t wait to graduate;  the “A” no longer holds us in its thrall, and our efforts to rock climb up to them no longer bedevils our lives.

            In our digital age, students are reduced to ID#s, grades, and bursar receipts.  Schools have become factory businesses squeezing students through the process. And how foolish it is that sites such as “Rate My Professor” consider “easiness” to be a good grade.

            To worry about grades and credits is to give our sense of self-respect over to the whims of others—to only believe in ourselves, as the origin of “credit” implies, when someone else “credits”—believes—in us.  It hurts me when I offer an exciting event for us to share as a class--like a play, museum visit, or field trip--and all a student asks is whether it will affect his grade if he skips it.  It hurts me when students ask for extra credit activities, instead of ways to expand their reading, writing, and performing experiences.

            This habit of caring more about credit than benefit is sometimes insidious in my life. Consider the Fitbitch. (Thank you, songwriting friend Morellen MacLeish for so renaming the Fitbit watches we wear). There are times when I lose sight of how the record-keeping it offers becomes more important than the health benefits of, let’s say, my daily physical exercise.  I get stressed out (I admit it), that I haven’t reached my daily quota of steps, or that I’m not reaching my weight goals.  The more I stress, the more onerous the exercise becomes and the more I stuff my face in response.  In short, I give my power of self-respect over to an impersonal, commercial device.  Really?!

            So, I remind myself to focus more on benefit, not credit.  Not how far have I walked, but how does the air feel, have the endorphins kicked in, how many ideas volunteer themselves to me as I swing my arms and legs.  Yes, I’m caught up in the credit mill as much as anyone else, but it no longer makes my life, as the rehab folks would put it, “unmanageable.”

Why am I doing this?  What are the intrinsic, real-life benefits?  This applies, here, too: I wrote this post because loving my students gives my life with meaning and joy.  I wrote this post to commit to living more authentically, myself.

Finally, in school, instead of focusing on credits and grades, ask yourself: “What am I learning?”  “How can I grow?”  “How does this amplify my life and self-respect?”  “How can I benefit in a real, lasting way?”  Ask yourself, following our addict metaphor, “Is this professor nurturing me, or is this professor a pusher?”