In my public school experience, the curriculum was what you had to get done. As a gifted kid, my own added expectations, both by my parents, my teachers, and myself, were to learn what was expected of me quickly, and then prove I knew it as quickly as possible. Throughout school, I was expected to understand everything and be the best (or, rather, one of the best in high school), and anything less than perfect wasn’t acceptable. I graduated high school around the same time that BC’s New Curriculum was being put in place, so my experience as a student is with the old syllabus based curriculum. While the expectations put on me, intentionally or otherwise, were probably not the best for a child, this curriculum worked for me. I was able to quickly master the skills and be the best. My memories of how that curriculum actually worked are vague, but I do remember that this syllabus, results oriented curriculum and assessment didn’t work as well for all of my peers as it did for me.
When I started my undergrad right out of high school, it was definitely a culture shock. Courses were harder, and everyone there had been one of the best in their high school, so my identity as a smart kid was challenged. A learning environment that pushes students to value being viewed as smart to the extent that it becomes a huge part of their identity isn’t one where students learn with a goal to better their knowledge, but one where the goal is maintaining that status of being smart. As Alfie Kohn said in his paper, grades hinder students’ absorption and understanding of the material. They learn to achieve an A, rather than to better understand the subject material. I had kept my drive to learn for the sake of learning through elementary and high school, but once I hit university, I definitely felt that switch in my mentality as I began cramming material into my brain to pass a test and then immediately forgetting most of what I’d studied as soon as it was over. First year science courses were the bane of my existence, and the main reason I switched into linguistics, which had a much more relaxed, learning to understand atmosphere.
In university, grading was also curved when too many people were doing too well.  That has never made sense to me, grading on a curve. Shouldn’t the teachers or professors be happy that they’re doing their job well enough for their class to consistently be scoring high? The same goes for professors or (mostly secondary as opposed to elementary) teachers who brag about never giving A’s. In my opinion, as is that of Alfie Kohn, having your students all achieve high grades should be the goal. If your students as a whole aren’t learning, it’s your job to figure out what’s going on and fix it. My biology twelve teacher was like that, and I received a paper back with a B due to marks being taken off for reasons that didn’t make sense. I fought it with both her and the principal, and ended up winning my A for that paper. For the rest of the semester, though, I had to make sure I didn’t mess anything up because she was waiting to pounce. This grade oriented learning and my teacher’s insistence that no one received A’s in her class was detrimental to my learning, as I spent the semester crafting perfect essays and responses and cramming for tests to ensure I kept that supposedly impossible grade rather than to increase my knowledge on the subjects I was learning.
This education program is really the first time I’ve had an experience with non-summative testing. Most of my linguistics course grades were based on a sum of grades from papers throughout the semester and didn’t have final exams, but none of them had the lax, pass/fail style of these education courses. At first, the lack of deadlines and non-specific syllabi of assignments threw me. I’ve spent the last eighteen years of my life developing an organizational system that works for the strict system of set deadlines, midterms, and final exams that my schooling had encompassed. When I started setting up that system for the semester, my planner was looking very empty of due dates and everything was in the “look further into due dates” category, and I honestly spent a while panicking about not knowing when things were due. Now, though, I have learned to appreciate this system. Focusing more on actually learning and absorbing the material than on what I need to memorize for a test has really allowed me to appreciate what I’m learning. Being able to take a breath and look deeper into areas that interest me will definitely be better for preparing me to teach than if I’d just been memorizing information so I could regurgitate it onto a test.
I believe that both formative and summative assessments have their place, but an environment where students’ only motivation for learning is to get good grades is detrimental to their ability to really absorb the information and truly learn. BC’s New Curriculum moves away from the rigidity of the old curriculum and gives teachers more flexibility in how and what they teach, and seems like a great step towards a new way of learning with less focus on grades and more on engaging students with the subject matter and enhancing their ability to learn. As a gradeless system is not currently the case, I hope to be able to utilize the New Curriculum to create as engaging as possible, and to give them all the best chance they have to excel.
