To say this is a pet peeve of mine would be a massive understatement. Participation grades in school really irk me. It shouldn’t matter whether or not I raise my hand to answer a question. If I’m acing every assignment and test, then you know I’m doing my job as a student. If the difference between an A and A- is one’s participation grade, that is grade A bullshit. I know the material when it matters. I would rather a teacher call on people unprompted to see if they are prepared to answer a question or have a pop quiz every now and then to keep the students on their toes. Only raising your hand when you know the question doesn’t show expertise on the material. It’s about those questions that trip you up at first, but then you have to re-examine the question and piece through your memory of the material to get the right answer.
Now, this doesn’t apply to every level of education. When you’re learning the basics from pre-K to fifth grade, I understand having a participation grade. It helps teach kids when to speak, when not to speak, and instills a level of respect toward the teacher and other students. By the time you get to sixth grade and you’re 11 or 12 years old, that method should be embedded in your mind. You’ve been following the same protocol for over at least six years. If a teacher wants to deduct points because you’re acting like an ass in class, that’s totally understandable. However, if you deduct points solely because a student doesn’t raise their hand to answer questions, that’s dumb. If you really want an answer, call on somebody randomly and if they don’t know, deduct some points while giving them the option to make them back up by then participating. It’s like having verbal pop quizzes.
Here’s an example why a participation grade is pointless. I took an AP Biology class during my sophomore year in high school and it was the toughest class I had in those four years. If you don’t know how an AP class works, it is essentially a college course you take in high school. The pace of the class is accelerated and you take an exam at the end of the year that determines if you get college credit or not. The AP exam is graded on a scale of 1-5, and if you get a 3 or above, you usually get college credit toward the university you attend. Some universities require a higher grade to get credit.
Anyway, a friend of mine would fall asleep during this class and the teacher hated it. We had the class first period and he played varsity football and soccer throughout the year so he was probably dog-tired. The teacher seemed to have a particular ire toward him though because other students had fallen asleep in the class before (we only had 13 students in the class so they were easy to point out). I eventually figured out why she seemed to dislike my friend so much. Even though he would catch Z’s during class, he killed the course. He was among the top performers in the class. He got a 4 on the AP exam while I got a 3 which pissed me off a little bit, not going to lie, but I was happy for him. I remember waking him up one time because the teacher was looking at him sleeping, and he was pissed at me for waking him up which I did not understand initially. I get his thought process now, “dude, stop waking me up, I’m the top student in the class.” Look, he probably wasn’t thinking that exactly, but it just goes to show how pointless a participation grade is. As you get older, it doesn’t really matter what you do in the classroom, but what you do outside of it.
Commentaires