A Blasphemous Confession

I know I will take a lot of criticism for the following blog, but as they say, confession is good for the soul. There are a couple of confessions that follow. Maybe they will not be earth-shattering to you, but educators will understand my shame.

Those of you who know me know that my life has taken a new and better direction since I developed a goal-setting program for my students. I know on the surface "goal-setting" sounds like another one of those goofy, fads that educators so willingly start only to have it flop, as so many do. My program is not gimmicky. It simply shows students how to set and achieve thier goals for the pure joy of achieving goals. There are no "rewards" for reaching a goal, other that delicious feeling of reaching the goal. The program has been successful beyond my wildest dreams and gave me a whole "lease" on my teaching life. I was able to teach kids to become self-motivated, and that had always been my dream; for kids to learn to love to learn.

So, where are the confessions, you ask? Here is one of them; not all kids buy it. Not all kids want to learn, or care about learning, and Mother Teresa (who we now know had her own struggles) probably couldn't reach them, and believe me, I ain't no Mother Teresa.

The joke among teachers about the "No Child Left Behind" program has been, "What about the kids who don't want to come?" Here is one of the hardest thing for me to admit, I can't, despite all my best efforts, teach every child who comes to my class to love to learn and to be self-motivated. One of my goals has been that I must let them go. (LIG)

What? What kind of cruel harpy am I? After 30 years I realize that some kids, for whatever reason, don't care about learning. They firmly believe that they will be a rock star, movie star, television star, or lottery winner. They will be so rich that education won't be important. Yea, good luck. Studies have shown that nearly 20% of all kids believe that. However, and here I must make a hugely important distinction; not all kids care about grades, which is very, very different from not wanting to learn. Not caring about grades is not really so horribly bad. Grades are not indicative of what a child has learned.

Here is my other confession, I don't care about grades either. As I just said, grades are not indicative of what a child has learned. I made it my policy nearly 20 years ago that any child who wanted staright A's could get them. I made high grades something within every child's reach. (Yes, it can be done without compromise, believe me.) Why? Because for many parents grades are monumentally important. They don't think, "My child GOT a 'C'", they think "My child IS a 'C', " and nothing, nothing can convince them otherwise. I knew years ago that grades were a very poor indicator of the knowledge that a child acquired. Grades don't work.

So here is the last part of my confession; if I have made every effort to see that getting high grades is attainable for ALL students and if they do not choose to take advantage of it, then I have to allow them to do so. The big picture is what has the child learned, not what grades a child recieves, or how well he or she performs on a test.

I have been a real hypocrite about this. I have told students I wouldn't chase them around about getting their work done and turned in, and yet I have. "Where is your work?" I will ask. It becomes a game that I always lose, and as long as I play the game I will always lose. Kids have much more energy and stamina than I do. So, am I saying that I am allowing children to fail? NO! I am allowing kids gets to recieve the bad grades they have earned. They have made that choice. BIG, big difference.

So there it is folks; if students don't turn in their work they get (stupid, meaningless) bad grades, and I declare here that I must let that go.