This Changes Everything

After 15 years of teaching, I still have those back-to-school nightmares. You know the ones. It would be the morning of the first day of school, and I wouldn’t know where my classroom was. Or what I would be teaching. The department office had been moved, and I couldn’t find the copy machine. I didn’t have time to prepare my handouts or look at my rosters. In one of these dreams, I even missed all my classes.

This school year was shaping up to look a lot like one of those nightmares. Two weeks before school was supposed to start, and we didn’t know what instructional model we would be following. Once we learned we would have a hybrid model, I could look at my rosters, but they didn’t mean anything because students had the option of switching to fully remote instruction at any time. My classroom was not yet equipped with the camera and microphone necessary for the live-streaming I would be expected to do. (And I wouldn’t know how to use them once they were.) I felt like a first-year teacher again. 

This should have been the second-hardest year of my career (aside from the first year). But it has actually been one of the best simply because I made one change last year: I stopped using points to evaluate students.

When I made this change, it was not because I predicted a global pandemic would completely reshape instruction. It was not because I thought assessing without points would make my life easier. (Spoiler: It didn’t.) It was because I could no longer ignore my heart, which for years had been telling me that something was deeply wrong. 

At first, I just ignored it. I took pride in my mind-bending multiple choice tests on Macbeth. I relished in the reputation I had earned as a “tough grader.” When I returned assessments, I sometimes felt butterflies, but I reasoned that I was just picking up on the students’ anxiety. I felt guilty when a child would cry over a low grade, but I told myself, “This is how they are. They take their grades too seriously. Their parents are too hard on them. They need to see the bigger picture.”

When that approach didn’t make me feel better, I tried reasoning with my students. I told them things I thought I believed, like, “You are not your grades” and “Mistakes are opportunities for learning.” I often said, “I dream of a world in which there are no grades, but until then . . .” we would continue doing what we had always done, wishing it felt better than it did. 

But no matter what I did or said, it never felt better. Because my heart knew—I knew—that if my students’ relationship to assessment was going to change, then I was going to have to change the way I assessed them. I would have to make the world I dreamed of. 

This has not been an easy process. World building never is. But it has unequivocally been the single most life-improving step I have ever taken—for both me and my students. 

This post is the first in a series I will be writing about my process to relearn assessment, reconnect with my students, and rediscover myself. 

After 15 years, I am finally the teacher I always wanted to be.