Reflections on Academic Performance and Failure
I recall a few comments from my interactions in the staffroom: "I feel sorry for her. She has a learning disability. This is the best she can do." Or "He is always distracted in class. He has lost all interest in studying. I am fed up with him." Or "She can do much better than this. She is just too lazy. I don't know what to do with her." Or "I feel sad when I read a paper like this. It's a personal thing for me. I wonder what they are learning in my class. I don't know if I'm teaching them well enough."
I am merely listing comments here, not analyzing or judging them. I feel each one comes from a place of genuine care and concern, also from a sense of importance attached to academic performance in determining how well a student is doing.
Lessons from a Movie
I am reminded of a movie seen years ago where Janardhanan fails in the first chemistry practical and then meets Uma, a friendly and helpful lab assistant who tells him that she too had failed the same test when she was a student. Janardhanan does feel encouraged but expresses his own doubts regarding abilities. Uma replies, "Don't recognize failure. It's simple. Then there's no failure. Just treat it as a minor setback, a mere hurdle that you are going to jump over."
The Pressure of Academic Expectations
I wonder how many schools have such conversations, how many Janardhanans are able to find such a Uma to talk to. I am reminded instead of parents who tell their children, "Why did you score only 99 on 100 in that math test? You could have got full marks. Where did you lose that one mark? You need to focus on your studies and avoid making such silly mistakes!" I am reminded of teachers who tell their students, "You are good for nothing. All you do is sit in my class, talk endlessly with your friends and write rubbish in your papers. You deserve what you've got!"
While this may appear to be an exaggeration, the snatches of conversation quoted above are all too common in India. There is a huge amount of hype around academic performance measured in the form of marks or grades.
The Culture of Assessment
I share with you the remarks of a speaker at a conference: "Cultures all over the world have come to rely on assessments and tests as the primary marker of a student's worth and achievement. We don't have assessments that score you on how good a friend you are, or how good at working in a team you are, but we're certainly good at assessing a student's grip on trigonometry. Until we loosen ourselves from this 'culture of assessment', both failure and success will be viewed through this narrow and very academic lens."
Unfortunately, students and parents do lose sleep over these markers of success, and the situation gets worse as children grow older. The competition only gets tougher, and with college admissions, every single mark matters a great deal. In such a situation, it is important to reflect on how we tend to view failure and the people we think of as having failed. While grading test papers, when we come across one that gets a very low grade, what are the thoughts that bubble up in our minds?
Reflecting on Failure
We as teachers feel bad when students do not meet expectations. Some of us are disappointed; some of us feel implicated in the student's failure. It is important to state here that we are discussing failure not only in terms of getting an F grade or a mark that is below the minimum required to 'pass' a test, but also in terms of performing at a level that the teacher feels is much lower than what the student seems capable of. In addition to the teacher, the student feels bad, the parents too. Let's say, in most cases.
What after this? Does this 'feeling bad' lead to any meaningful reflection on our part or conversation with the student that might help him/her? How many of us think about the various reasons that might be responsible for the student losing interest in a particular subject? Could his/her sagging interest levels be related to our teaching methods? Why does the student seem distracted all the time? Is he/she struggling with personal problems that we are unaware of? Why is the student being lazy and not performing up to his/her capacity? Could this be related to the fact that we as teachers are not challenging him/her enough to think outside his/her comfort zone? Is it really the student's fault when the curriculum and the test favor assimilation and reproduction of facts instead of applying concepts learned to real-life situations that are meaningful to the student?
The Importance of Broader Perspectives
These are very important questions to think about. Perhaps the most unsettling and significant one is: Is it alright if the student and his/her parents do not place much importance on academic performance and are more interested in his/her enjoying whatever he/she participates in, particularly extracurricular activities? This is a tantalizing one to answer. Yes, I think it is alright. Who am I to decide for that child and that family what their priorities ought to be? They may not want to raise their child keeping a future IITian or IIM graduate in mind. Fair enough! In fact, if I had a child, I most probably would have made the same parenting choice.
Failure, then, is not an absolute. It is clearly a matter of perception. Academic expectations and cut-offs, however objective they might seem, are based on a prioritization of skills, knowledge, and values. If a student gets a 'D' grade on an English test and gets the same grade over three consecutive tests, one would tend to assume that the student is terrible at English. However, that may not necessarily be true.
Rethinking Assessment Methods
Most school examinations in India require students to answer in writing. The situation gets even more complex when we ask open-ended questions that require them to think beyond familiar texts and exercise their critical thinking skills. When a student writes an answer that we think of as unsatisfactory, we rarely consider the fact that he/she may have a rich imaginative response to offer but his/her written expression may not be able to match the depth of his/her imagination. It may not even be a case of being limited by one's vocabulary in English. The student may have dyslexia, or simply feel more at home expressing those thoughts in speech rather than in writing.
If all written examinations were scrapped, and students were tested on conceptual understanding and application only through oral examinations and personal interviews, would there be a marked difference in the academic performance of students? This is worth thinking about.
The Role of Literature Papers
If we take the case of a literature paper instead of a language skills paper, and find a student scoring 90 on 100, we may want to study the questions to gain an understanding of what the student is being tested on. Usually, the student is being asked to state which character in a prescribed play uttered a particular line, whom it was addressed to, and in what context. Else, the student may be asked to explain the significance of a specific word and its implications in a given scene, or the use of literary devices and the writer's intention behind employing them. Banks of such questions, accompanied by model answers, are easily available for rote-learning.
It is no secret that students usually fetch more marks in papers on literary appreciation of prescribed texts than in papers that test their ability to write essays or comprehend prose and poetry excerpts that are unfamiliar to them. Success in a literature paper at the school level involves, to a great extent, being prepared to spout expected answers to anticipated questions. Failure may not really mean an inability to make sense of Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage' in the context of the student's own life and relationships. Failure may simply mean an inability to offer what the 'answer key' demanded as a response to a particular question. This, to my mind, is most arbitrary and undesirable.
Challenges in Setting Question Papers
Why do teachers set such question papers? Don't they want students to think rather than memorize? For one, they are limited by the format of the test determined by the education board they are affiliated with. Even if the students are not required to appear for public exams to be taken by all schools affiliated with a particular board, it is widely observed that schools start preparing their students for public exams at least two or three years in advance. Most schools want to boast of high achievers and merit rankers. This is brand-building.
The Teacher's Role in Student Success
A teacher friend in the United States informs me, "If a student is 'failing' in a certain teacher's class, oftentimes some of this 'failure' will be transferred onto the teacher. Why couldn't the teacher serve them better, the parents, administration, or other teachers might ask. Also, a teacher is responsible for the culture of their classroom, as well as test scores. If the social dynamic of the room is chaotic, or if test scores suffer across the board for the students in the room, oftentimes it is the teacher that bears the blame for 'failing' these students as well."
If we applied this logic to the Indian situation, it is clear why schools love to have students score insanely high marks. It gives them a good name. Many schools ask under-performing students to leave before they appear for public exams in order to eliminate any threat to their possibility of securing a cent-percent result, which means that all students pass, and the school has no 'failures'. Clearly, schools themselves are afraid of failure. How will they offer any succor to students? How will they grow Umas to support Janardhanans?
He adds, "Teachers should take risks, to try new strategies, to expand their sense of the curricula that they have been handed duly supported by their administrations. As otherwise there should be no expectations that teachers themselves would try to expand the already very rigid boundaries they work within."
Regards.
From India, Madras
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457I recall a few comments from my interactions in the staffroom: "I feel sorry for her. She has a learning disability. This is the best she can do." Or "He is always distracted in class. He has lost all interest in studying. I am fed up with him." Or "She can do much better than this. She is just too lazy. I don't know what to do with her." Or "I feel sad when I read a paper like this. It's a personal thing for me. I wonder what they are learning in my class. I don't know if I'm teaching them well enough."
I am merely listing comments here, not analyzing or judging them. I feel each one comes from a place of genuine care and concern, also from a sense of importance attached to academic performance in determining how well a student is doing.
Lessons from a Movie
I am reminded of a movie seen years ago where Janardhanan fails in the first chemistry practical and then meets Uma, a friendly and helpful lab assistant who tells him that she too had failed the same test when she was a student. Janardhanan does feel encouraged but expresses his own doubts regarding abilities. Uma replies, "Don't recognize failure. It's simple. Then there's no failure. Just treat it as a minor setback, a mere hurdle that you are going to jump over."
The Pressure of Academic Expectations
I wonder how many schools have such conversations, how many Janardhanans are able to find such a Uma to talk to. I am reminded instead of parents who tell their children, "Why did you score only 99 on 100 in that math test? You could have got full marks. Where did you lose that one mark? You need to focus on your studies and avoid making such silly mistakes!" I am reminded of teachers who tell their students, "You are good for nothing. All you do is sit in my class, talk endlessly with your friends and write rubbish in your papers. You deserve what you've got!"
While this may appear to be an exaggeration, the snatches of conversation quoted above are all too common in India. There is a huge amount of hype around academic performance measured in the form of marks or grades.
The Culture of Assessment
I share with you the remarks of a speaker at a conference: "Cultures all over the world have come to rely on assessments and tests as the primary marker of a student's worth and achievement. We don't have assessments that score you on how good a friend you are, or how good at working in a team you are, but we're certainly good at assessing a student's grip on trigonometry. Until we loosen ourselves from this 'culture of assessment', both failure and success will be viewed through this narrow and very academic lens."
Unfortunately, students and parents do lose sleep over these markers of success, and the situation gets worse as children grow older. The competition only gets tougher, and with college admissions, every single mark matters a great deal. In such a situation, it is important to reflect on how we tend to view failure and the people we think of as having failed. While grading test papers, when we come across one that gets a very low grade, what are the thoughts that bubble up in our minds?
Reflecting on Failure
We as teachers feel bad when students do not meet expectations. Some of us are disappointed; some of us feel implicated in the student's failure. It is important to state here that we are discussing failure not only in terms of getting an F grade or a mark that is below the minimum required to 'pass' a test, but also in terms of performing at a level that the teacher feels is much lower than what the student seems capable of. In addition to the teacher, the student feels bad, the parents too. Let's say, in most cases.
What after this? Does this 'feeling bad' lead to any meaningful reflection on our part or conversation with the student that might help him/her? How many of us think about the various reasons that might be responsible for the student losing interest in a particular subject? Could his/her sagging interest levels be related to our teaching methods? Why does the student seem distracted all the time? Is he/she struggling with personal problems that we are unaware of? Why is the student being lazy and not performing up to his/her capacity? Could this be related to the fact that we as teachers are not challenging him/her enough to think outside his/her comfort zone? Is it really the student's fault when the curriculum and the test favor assimilation and reproduction of facts instead of applying concepts learned to real-life situations that are meaningful to the student?
The Importance of Broader Perspectives
These are very important questions to think about. Perhaps the most unsettling and significant one is: Is it alright if the student and his/her parents do not place much importance on academic performance and are more interested in his/her enjoying whatever he/she participates in, particularly extracurricular activities? This is a tantalizing one to answer. Yes, I think it is alright. Who am I to decide for that child and that family what their priorities ought to be? They may not want to raise their child keeping a future IITian or IIM graduate in mind. Fair enough! In fact, if I had a child, I most probably would have made the same parenting choice.
Failure, then, is not an absolute. It is clearly a matter of perception. Academic expectations and cut-offs, however objective they might seem, are based on a prioritization of skills, knowledge, and values. If a student gets a 'D' grade on an English test and gets the same grade over three consecutive tests, one would tend to assume that the student is terrible at English. However, that may not necessarily be true.
Rethinking Assessment Methods
Most school examinations in India require students to answer in writing. The situation gets even more complex when we ask open-ended questions that require them to think beyond familiar texts and exercise their critical thinking skills. When a student writes an answer that we think of as unsatisfactory, we rarely consider the fact that he/she may have a rich imaginative response to offer but his/her written expression may not be able to match the depth of his/her imagination. It may not even be a case of being limited by one's vocabulary in English. The student may have dyslexia, or simply feel more at home expressing those thoughts in speech rather than in writing.
If all written examinations were scrapped, and students were tested on conceptual understanding and application only through oral examinations and personal interviews, would there be a marked difference in the academic performance of students? This is worth thinking about.
The Role of Literature Papers
If we take the case of a literature paper instead of a language skills paper, and find a student scoring 90 on 100, we may want to study the questions to gain an understanding of what the student is being tested on. Usually, the student is being asked to state which character in a prescribed play uttered a particular line, whom it was addressed to, and in what context. Else, the student may be asked to explain the significance of a specific word and its implications in a given scene, or the use of literary devices and the writer's intention behind employing them. Banks of such questions, accompanied by model answers, are easily available for rote-learning.
It is no secret that students usually fetch more marks in papers on literary appreciation of prescribed texts than in papers that test their ability to write essays or comprehend prose and poetry excerpts that are unfamiliar to them. Success in a literature paper at the school level involves, to a great extent, being prepared to spout expected answers to anticipated questions. Failure may not really mean an inability to make sense of Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage' in the context of the student's own life and relationships. Failure may simply mean an inability to offer what the 'answer key' demanded as a response to a particular question. This, to my mind, is most arbitrary and undesirable.
Challenges in Setting Question Papers
Why do teachers set such question papers? Don't they want students to think rather than memorize? For one, they are limited by the format of the test determined by the education board they are affiliated with. Even if the students are not required to appear for public exams to be taken by all schools affiliated with a particular board, it is widely observed that schools start preparing their students for public exams at least two or three years in advance. Most schools want to boast of high achievers and merit rankers. This is brand-building.
The Teacher's Role in Student Success
A teacher friend in the United States informs me, "If a student is 'failing' in a certain teacher's class, oftentimes some of this 'failure' will be transferred onto the teacher. Why couldn't the teacher serve them better, the parents, administration, or other teachers might ask. Also, a teacher is responsible for the culture of their classroom, as well as test scores. If the social dynamic of the room is chaotic, or if test scores suffer across the board for the students in the room, oftentimes it is the teacher that bears the blame for 'failing' these students as well."
If we applied this logic to the Indian situation, it is clear why schools love to have students score insanely high marks. It gives them a good name. Many schools ask under-performing students to leave before they appear for public exams in order to eliminate any threat to their possibility of securing a cent-percent result, which means that all students pass, and the school has no 'failures'. Clearly, schools themselves are afraid of failure. How will they offer any succor to students? How will they grow Umas to support Janardhanans?
He adds, "Teachers should take risks, to try new strategies, to expand their sense of the curricula that they have been handed duly supported by their administrations. As otherwise there should be no expectations that teachers themselves would try to expand the already very rigid boundaries they work within."
Regards.
From India, Madras
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