(WARNING: Superlatives Ahead) - the 16 most important pages of my life

Yesterday, I posted about an article I read in college that I was dying to read again. I knew the general theme and the lessons I had gleaned, but couldn’t recall any specifics. As a result, I’ve been spending the last week wracking my brain for details and unsuccessfully stringing words together into Google. I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I finally emailed my professor, who knew exactly what I was talking about, and sent me a very nice email back with a PDF of the article, called “The Alumnus and the Grading Game” from Howard Kirschenbaum’s book Wad-ja-get? The Grading Game in American Education. Here are a few select quotes:

Grades become inextricably tied to a person’s sense of his own worth. If I had my school life to do over again, I never would have tried to collect all those A’s. They have gotten between me and life; and I say to you, life is more important, more interesting and more challenging than any number of A’s, if they were piled from here to the moon. The fact is, whether someone gets high grades or low grades or even average ones has nothing to do with whether or not he is a good, a courageous, a loving, a beautify or a worthy person.

Yes, it’s cliched and naive. Some of it could be seen as misguided and more than a little idealistic, and perhaps I’m being melodramatic. Reading it now, having experienced some of the trench warfare of the “real world”, it seems cutesy. If I had read this for the first time today, it’s possible I would have scoffed at its cloying preciousness. Much of our daily lives requires some sort of grading. We can’t exactly say, “well boss, my sales figures were pretty dismal this quarter, but I sure learned a lot and, boy, did I grow as a person!”. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to see why this article was so influential to me as a young college student. It was refreshing in its tone, and although it didn’t rock our classroom (or its traditional grading system) to the core, it was just what I – an aimless college student with no idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up – needed. Such a simple and obvious concept.