Perfectionism

Normally, I don't classify Casia as a perfectionist. In Kindergarten, she was entirely happy with her quickly scribbled pictures and could never understand her teacher's desire for her to "color inside the lines". With craft projects and holiday cards, she'll whip up something quickly without giving a second thought to mis-folded papers, misspelled words, and the dog hairs stuck under the tape. But something happened in the years between 1st and 4th grade where Casia learned that in school, the measure of a good student is getting 100% on all assignments.

I get it. I remember being in school and being furious with myself if I missed a question and ended up with a 96%. But as a parent, and now as Casia's teacher, I have a much different perspective on the issue. 

She doesn't get an official report card, so grades aren't a necessary function for that bureaucratic task. My husband and I are now the sole judges of whether Casia is learning sufficiently in quantity and quality, and since we are also the ones with first-hand perspective to see these results (through her written work and through conversations with her), grades are not required for us to make that determination. So why grade at all? 

On one hand, test scores can be a quick way to establish how well a student has mastered the material. You can see trends over time, comparisons between subjects (is she doing well in math but needs more work in science?) or even to evaluate between students. If you have a whole classroom of kids, it can be quite valuable in determining which kids are getting it and which aren't. But not all tests are created equally. Not all students respond the same way to being graded. And not all grades are a true reflection of learning. And isn't learning, after all, the point of education?

When we started this homeschooling journey, I decided to assess Casia's progress in much the same way that traditional schools do. She takes tests, hands in homework and has writing assignments. Some of these receive grades, in part, as a measure of how well she grasped the assignment, but  primarily because she has grown to expect a numerical value to be placed on her output. She likes it. She demands it. But now I am really starting to question the benefits of this. 

From the start, I warned Casia that my grading is going to be different, and by different, I mean harder, than her last year's teacher. At first she balked at that. But then I reasoned with her that multiple choice tests, particularly for a student who excels at test talking, is not the best measure of her knowledge. It's more a measure of her ability to guess well. If you don't know something, you have a 25% chance of still getting it right. And her teacher last year would always make at least one (but sometimes two) of the choices so utterly ridiculous that if you were actually reading it, you'd never select those choices, increasing you guessing odds. 

It's been an adjustment for Casia, but she has transitioned well to fill in the blank, short answer, and short essay test questions. Until today. Today was the test in Biology on cell respiration. I knew when I wrote the test that it was hard. We had covered a lot of material and I knew she had really studied and would do well on it, but I did warn her that this was going to be more difficult than previous unit tests. 

It's a challenge figuring out just how much to teach and test Casia. Academically, she is is far more capable than her nine years would lead you to believe, but still, she is young. I have to consider depth versus interest; strike a balance between what she can achieve and what she needs to know. I saw her languish in public school where the expectations were far to low for her to ever live up to her potential. She wilted for lack of stimulation. While homeschooling, I've seen her interest grow as her knowledge is broadened which leads to more desire to explore deeper. It's really a wonder to see her flourish when she is actually given a chance to spread her wings. But she is still conditioned that school should be easy, spoon-fed, and for her to always receive those 'perfect' grades.

So today, when she scored only an 87% on her science test, she was in tears. She felt like she had failed and was convinced she did horribly. All this despite my handwritten notes on the top that read "Awesome Job!" and at the end explaining, "This was a really hard test and you did a great job. I am so proud of you!" I knew even as I was correcting the test that this was going to be a hard grade for her to see. I comforted her and tried to explain that I wrote the test knowing that it was hard, but I needed to give her a chance to show what she can do. I could have made it really easy, multiple choice even, but even if she got a perfect score, it really wouldn't have shown me how much she really understood of the concepts. That an 87% that she had to work for is actually better than a 100% that came to her easily. Both Jacob and I tried to instill in her that the learning is way more important than the grade and that this test shows how much she truly knows. We stressed how proud we are of her. 

I'm not sure how much of our words of wisdom sunk in. I'm dreading the next test, both writing it and having her take it. But I don't want to take a step back and intentionally simplify it just to boost her self-esteem; a self-worth that is resting on a superficial number. But I don't want her to feel like a failure either. So I believe the real lesson today is to focus on accomplishments and not an arbitrary number; to stress the hard work that went into a task and not the label placed on the final results; to feel self-assured that our knowledge can not be simply measured but that it's acquisition should always remain our primary educational goal.

(I'm providing a copy of her test. When I filched these diagrams off the internet, I hadn't been planning on posting them on my blog, but here's the credit to their creators: Diagram 1 came from BioAP site and Diagram 2 came from School Notes by Jane Arkinstall.)