Ungrading: Reflection Post #4 (Ch2: What Going Gradeless Taught Me About Doing the 'Actual Work', by Aaron Blackwelder), part 1

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Who Gets to Say You’re a Mathematician? Grades? Me? Anyone?

Blackwelder talks about the role that grades play in both somehow empowering and disempowering teachers as “gatekeepers.” Without loss of generality, I’ll reflect on this from my position as a math teacher.

I am a mathematician. I am a part of the community of mathematicians. My primary role in that community is as a math teacher. I have assumed the power and responsibilities of bringing/inviting others (typically children) into the community of mathematicians.

This process *can* be rooted in relationships. My relationship with my students, and our own relationships with math. But the theme of Blackwelder’s chapter is that the mechanism of grading actually rends that process from the humanizing space of relationships. It instead relegates it to an abstract numerical and ultimately dehumanizing “black box” of grading. In this way, grading disempowers me as a gatekeeper.

I think most educators would defend their grading system as humanizing. Properties like “dropping your lowest quiz grade” or being “standards-based” are definitely steps in the direction of equity and re-humanization. But steps like those feel more like liberalism than truly radical abolitionism, in the sense that they don’t actually threaten to deconstruct the system of grading as a whole (a move which I believe to be essential for a humanizing education).

This is all to say that I identify as a human mathematician, who has assumed the responsibility of helping other humans find community amongst mathematicians. I believe that community is principally mediated through relationships. So I need to find ways to re-center those relationships as the means by which students find themselves (hopefully) more connected to the community of mathematicians.

The relationships that are centered extend beyond the ones between my students and me. They exist between my students as peers, and between them and the broader community of mathematicians and math itself. I don’t think it is my role, responsibility, or even my opportunity to officially “induct” students into the community of mathematicians. Our identification as community members is co-constructed between us and the community, not ordained by some minister of judgement.

“Grades” make this decision of “admittance” for us. If a student gets a “good enough” grade, they are given some state-approved stamp of approval. This process then allows me as a teacher to define the system of grading, falsely empowering me alone to pass judgement, a power one which ultimately is not alone mine.