When Adults Ruin Teaching: Grades

Does this teacher only give out As or is the student
expecting an A for sucking-up? It's like the chicken and the egg.

"When Adults Ruin Teaching" is the working title of my forth-coming memoir (please note that the "r" in memoir is silent). It will be organized in such a way that the busy reader can, like students today, not actually have to read anything at all, yet still feel they are experts on the subject at hand. Here is a brief excerpt to whet your appetite:

Grading: Or, the Importance of Giving Only As

In teacher college, you probably sat around with other privileged (clueless) white people and talked about a grading philosophy for young learners. This is all nonsense, just like the education class which prompted the discussion. All you need to know is the following: everyone gets an A.

It's quite simple. Regardless of the amount of thought/effort/time that went into the work, or the quality of the product, or how the product demonstrates the learner's content/skill mastery, give them an A. If you give them a sticker too, you're less likely to be the subject of hateful adolescent tweets. There is some research to back up this last claim, though it is not at all credible and probably came from Wikipedia.

Under no circumstances should you ever give an A-. 

These are actually worse than Bs and are akin to bullying.

If you do not give all of your students As, one of two things will happen. One: the student will ask you to re-do an assignment. In your infinite adult wisdom, you must allow this. It is therefore in your self-interest to just give them an A to begin with. This will save you the time and headache of creating additional, meaningful, life-changing re-assessments and scheduling a time for the re-assessment around the child's insanely busy, stressful life now that it is crew season. Crew practice is super important. It is universally acknowledged that a young person will never have to read and think critically as a contributing member of society, but they will have to row a boat, every damn day of their adult lives.

The other dreadfully terrible thing that will happen when you don't just give everyone an A is that people will assume you think students are unequal in their intellectual abilities. This sort of thinking fell out of favor long ago and is probably racist, sexist, anti-gay, or some combination of the three.

To sum it all up, just giving everyone an A is great because:

1-It frees up more time for you as a professional educator to make spreadsheets of how your students' grades are progressing over time.
2-It enables those in the building who make several times your salary to not have to deal with any real issues, apart from the occasional underwear fire in the boy's bathroom.
3-It takes all the thought out of your work, so you can fit in with other government employees.
4-It gives you an excuse to buy super fun, sparkly stickers.
5-Students are less likely to turn your last name into a hateful hashtag.
6-Parents are happy.
7-It makes everyone feel good about themselves, especially the teacher.

Now that you're an expert on grading, give yourself a sticker and read on...