On Grading and Problem-Solving

My youngest son recently raised a minor stir in his classroom. His teacher reminded the class, "Don't forget your required extra credit work is due this Friday." He then replied, "Isn't that an oxymoron?" Beyond being proud of my son's vocabulary and mature approach to questioning authority, I've been thinking about this grading nonsense.

The underlying reason for the teacher's requirement of extra credit is well-intentioned, some of her students won't pass without the extra points. But I was thinking about the problem-solving and subsequent solution. In talking it through with my wife, I came up with this analogy. Helping kids raise their grades with extra credit work is like curing a fever by dipping the thermometer in ice. The numbers change but not the underlying problem. If a child has low grades, there is a deeper issue than finding out how to plop more points in his/her basket. Maybe the child doesn't understand the work, or maybe the teaching is ineffective for the child's needs, or maybe there are peer issues impairing to learning, or maybe the work is simply to difficult... The grade goes up, the larger teaching/learning issues remain unaddressed.

It strikes me also that this is related to my greatest objection to the current way-beyond-high-to-the-point-of-absurdity stakes testing. So much of schools' efforts are focused on teaching to the tests that learning and love of learning are severely impaired. To sustain the metaphor, rather than treat the illness leading to the fever, we're teaching children how to hold the thermometer in their mouths in ways that the fever won't register.