The more I thought about episode during the day, the more it came back to a some chronic problems with our current education system :
- “the problem with marks” in school;
- all the negativity and stress and anxiety that goes with marks ;
- the growing sense of working within a system that has lost a lot of the sense of what it is doing (as it the case with any sort of behemoth of an administrative system).
- A growing chasm between school, how it works, what its goals are, and what young people feel is required for their future
- A growing sense of materialistic approach to school and all that goes with it
- A machine-like approach to school-as-a-chore that one cannot inherently like, as opposed to a sense of being invested in it, because by doing so you are investing in your own self, and in your own development
I’ve been teaching now for 17 years. It has now been 10 years that I’m in my current school, one of the more elite in Paris, and therefore in the country. I never cease to be amazed the utter obsession of the kids with their marks, the absolute conviction that it is the one and only important measure of everything.
And, unfortunately but not surprisingly, what goes naturally with this attitude is the fear of “making a mistake”. I don’t think this is an exclusively french problem, but it is very french. It is definitely a much bigger issue in France than North America for example, at least when it comes to secondary school education.
If I were to simplify things into a soundbite : “In north america you get marks for what you know, in France you lose marks for what you don’t know”.
Now let’s add on top of that the very french issue of elitism in school, by which I mean marks based selection rejection into elite post-secondary Ecoles, which for many in the middle and upper middle class and above parts of the society is more important than whatever you may study if and when you get there, and you have the recipe for stress, anxiety, and “hypothesis-fixing” like I saw in the exam for my last-year students.
It’s sad to think that we’ve gone far enough off track, that the best students I have, who wish to go into the sciences feel like they have to resort to such anti-scientific means in order to get into such studies. It makes you wonder a lot of various things, such as “why do they want to go into the sciences?” (even though for the majority of them it’s going into engineering schools).
I think the question of marks is a huge one, that deserves a lot more reflexion and on its own, but it can’t be divorced from all other things regarding this issue. But I feel like this is yet another derivative of the whole studying for exams, or the whole ‘teach to the test’ mentality (even though the latter is not quite the same thing as the general issue of exams and marks).
I’ve lost count of the number of iterations of the “you are not your marks” speech over the years, but it simply doesn’t seem to reach kids (and their parents). We all know the pros and certainly the cons of examination as a way of evaluating a student; but as I have to often remind students and parents, it is one of the many tools we teachers have to get an image of the level of a student, his strong and weak points; not to mention the only feasible and efficient way we have of measuring and selecting students for advancing in their studies in a specific field.
