Divided By Zero

Whenever I tell people that I’m a teacher I invariably hear, a) “I was a terrible kid—you would have hated teaching me,” and b) “There’s so much wrong with the education system. And kids these days are so lazy, entitled, and show no respect.”

                Everyone has gone through school, and for some reason that makes everyone an expert on the education system. It’s phenomenon unique to my profession. In learning how to drive a car, I never felt that I had acquired expertise on the finer points of internal combustion; I go to the hospital when I am injured, but I do not point out how I feel a surgeon can improve her methods; I enjoy a lobster once in a while, but I have no idea how to set, bait, or retrieve traps. You get the point.

                But because everyone goes to school, everyone is an expert on education. Sitting in classrooms for twelve years is apparently all you need to know about how education is implemented and modified. And because high school involves two groups that are more often than not despised by society at large for their laziness and pampered lifestyles (namely teens and teachers), when something controversial comes up, the reaction of the general public is often incomparably negative and inconceivably ignorant.

                When it came out last week that Edmonton Physics teacher Lynden Dorval had been suspended for not following his school’s “no zero” policy, the media pounced, and the masses leaped a foot in the air. It’s been everywhere lately, and the enraged surprise has me flabbergasted because none of this is new. Many school divisions have been using no zero polices, or something like them, for years. Dorval has just made a calculated decision—this was all done with intent—to bring it out fully to a public that may have been unaware.

                Unfortunately, because people are already experts on the education system, they attacked this with resounding ignorance, making no attempts to delve into the facts. If this were a Social Studies essay, they would have failed miserably. Bombardment! Facebook, Twitter, CBC Radio’s Unconventional Panel, Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Labritz—everyone has been shooting off their mouths, pens, and keyboards as to how the system is creating a bunch of spoiled brats who don’t know the meaning of working for results. All anyone has heard is “teacher fired for giving zeroes,” and it was picked up and sprinted with.

“Entitlement.”

“Rewarding laziness . . .”

“In my day . . .”

“In the real world . . .”

Dorval’s case hasn’t received the careful sort of analysis we would have our English Language Arts students use in approaching a character’s motivations. If you have heard the man interviewed, he’s not drawing a line in the sand with zeroes on one side and anarchy on the other. He has given his students every chance possible to get in late assignments, but at the end of the semester, if he doesn’t see the homework, zero it is. Personally, I agree with this approach. Dorval is 61, and the higher you go up the pension ladder, the more resistance you see to no zeroes, comment-based assessments, and floating due dates. He sounds like he has tried harder to bend than a lot of those more jaded by years in this profession—just not quite hard enough.

Is he being fired? I think he’s chosen to retire with a very loud bang.

Assessment For (as opposed to Of) Learning is not an “every kid wins even if she does nothing” philosophy, as critics in newspaper columns would have us believe as they dump buckets of dirt into clean wells.

School is there to teach first, to impart knowledge. It is a place for trial and error, so if a kid performs a task and the only feedback he gets is 7/10, where does he go with that? How does he improve? School does not exist only to “prepare kids for the real world”—that preparation comes from the combination and synthesis of the information they get from school, parents, and personal experiences.

And what is this “real world” that keeps getting preached, anyway? This “if you don’t do it and do it right the first time, you get fired” world where no one has even had a mother who loved him and every Boomer is the model of hard work and professionalism?

Is this the real world where we ask for extended deadlines on projects, knowing that the quality of the project trumps all? Is this the real world where you wait half an hour for service from a disinterested clerk in an electronics store? Is this the real world where you order your steak medium rare and get chicken? Do these people lose their jobs? Puh­-lease. I think you’re confusing reality with ideality—your ant-hill utopia doesn’t exist.

Overall, I have a pretty similar approach to Dorval. When every last chance has been exhausted, I do give a zero. But then, my school division doesn’t have a policy like his, so zeroes are a resort I have access to. That’s what they are, though, a last resort. I avoid giving marks as punishment. My job is not to punish, nor to teach that the only valuable pursuit is reward, nor to present kids with some dog-eat-dog depiction of a world that doesn’t exist. My job is to teach, to help kids turn themselves into people who can think for themselves.

Hopefully, they will learn to consider the facts of an issue before firing off an opinion on it, and accept that because they have experienced the results of a system, they may not be experts on how it works.