Remember that red, fake leather, magazine-sized book teachers carried around with gold letters on the cover that said “Grade Book”? It was full of pages of tiny squares into which the teacher would put grades next to your name. The very sight of the books could strike terror into some students’ hearts and make other students eager with anticipation. It was a volume more motivational in some cases than even Facebook is today. It got kids to do things — like assignments, and studying. It worked.
When I retired after 25 years of teaching English in Vermont high schools in 2012, the one physical thing I took with me was all 25 of those red books. I couldn’t leave them behind or throw them away. They were “my” kids, and “my” career.
Even though during the last 10 or 11 years of my career grades at my high school were recorded in a digital form accessible to parents, I continued to keep a duplicate in a physical book every year, for the same reason I keep a flashlight in a storm — backup.
Before the digital age, the principal’s secretary was in charge of ordering and handing out the red grade-books to teachers on the first day of school. The announcement would come over the PA, “Teachers may pick up their grade-books in the principal’s office” during “teacher preparation week” before school began.
One year the secretary decided to order different books with tiny graph squares for grades that were just a little bit smaller than those in previous books. It made entering the grades by hand a nightmare of miniature preciseness, and made reading them a magnifying-glass challenge. It taught me to use pencil, not ink, and I never went back. But I did ask for a re-order of the old larger graphed grade book — and got it.
My 25 grade books have 2,880 students in them by name and class and period of the day. Halfway through my career, my school changed its schedule from 10 year-long periods of 45 minutes each school day to four half-year classes of 89 minutes each. We went from teaching 60 or 70 students for a full year to — in my case — a high of 142 students in half-year sessions.
This doesn’t sound like much of a work difference and it wasn’t. But it was an emotional difference. Having a kid in class for an entire year gave the teacher the satisfaction of watching him or her grow intellectually in a way that half a year just didn’t offer, especially at my level, 11th grade.
Any parent knows that there is tremendous mental growth spurt around 15 to 18 years of age. I felt deprived of sharing in that growth as a teacher. I was the only member of my faculty to vote against transitioning from a 45-minute period to an 89-minute block schedule. I still feel that way.
The other thing the block schedule required was abolishing study halls. This made it possible for the required number of classes to occur every semester in our physical plant without having to build new classrooms. My cynical hunch is that this was the deciding factor for the administration in switching to the block schedule, but I don’t know.
After I retired I created a blog and decided to record all of my class rosters digitally (just the names, not the grades) year by year, class title by class title.
I began with the most recent class and I completed recording in the first year of my retirement 12 years of classes from 2012 back to 2000, or more than 1,400 students.
Then I stopped the project for two years. It seemed a pointless effort. Recently I returned to the keyboard and completed the last 13 years from 2000 to 1986. I discovered I had taught 2,880 students. Sadly, 14 of them had died premature deaths. Only two were natural deaths. Of the 14, 13 were boys and one was a girl. I could see all of their faces as I recorded their names, typing (dec.) after each name. I still think of them as I write these very words. Tragically, one of my students gave his life as a Marine lance corporal in the aftermath of the Iraq War.
I began my teaching career at Whitcomb High School in Bethel in 1986, the year the Challenger tragedy happened.
Later, when I taught at Hartford High in White River Junction, the Gulf War occurred in 1990-91. I had my English classes keep a five-minute diary entry every class day of the war. We had no idea how long that assignment would last. It was before we transitioned to half-year block schedules, so I would have these kids in class for the full year and was fully expecting the war to last that long, given my memories of Korea and Vietnam. It ended in months, and we were all pleasantly surprised that our diary had been completed so soon. That same year the Soviet Union came to an end, but we did not realize the importance of that as intensely as we understood the daily reports from the Gulf War.
In 2001, the World Trade Center terrorist attacks occurred on a school day. Across from my English classroom was the athletic office, which had a television visible through its hallway window. Many of us watched in horror as the second tower was hit and the first one came roaring to the ground. Parents’ Night was a day or two later and I told the parents that it was the only time in my teaching career I was speechless, totally without an answer for the kids who wanted to know what their teacher thought it meant. Many of the parents nodded in agreement when I confessed I was dumbfounded.
The public teaching profession in 2016 is toying with the idea of doing away with grades entirely and merely using “proficient” and “non-proficient” to assess assignments, tests, etc. This would confound college admissions officers all around the country who would have to rely on other achievements (standardized tests?) to determine an applicant’s suitability for admission to a Yale or a Quinnipiac. It also flies in the face of human nature.
Human beings like to win. An “A” is a lot more motivating than a “proficient.” But since grade-books have evaporated into the digital “cloud,” maybe it’s time for human beings to get modern too, and do away with old-fashioned ideas like “rewards.”
I persuaded the high school faculty in my school in the late 1990s to vote to abolish “failure” as a grade and replace it with “no credit.” That was the year the school switched to digital report cards. The new digital system had no way of removing “failure” from its hierarchy and the faculty vote was stymied. Digital reality won out over faculty idealism.
Those 25 grade-books sit proudly on a shelf in my study. They may soon be artifacts of a dying world, like cursive or land-line phones. I hope they brought as much joy to my students as they did fear and anxiety. I am proud of my 25 years of teaching and all the penciled applause I entered in those fake red leather motivators.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.