I recently got accredited as a mediator through the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution. For anyone keeping track (hi mom), I can add this new credential to my trophy cabinet along with my PhD, the New York Bar, JD, LLM, BA, blah blah. This is not to brazenly brag about my accolades, but to establish a point that I have jumped over my fair share of hurdles, which at least on paper, makes me seem “competent”.
What these supposed achievements do not reveal is that I am still rather childish and lack the wisdom to navigate the world with grace. I am quickly irritated by small things that I cannot control and hold on to naïve beliefs like “teachers can make a difference” (which is a point I’ll come back to later). I don’t like taking anything too seriously and I really hate taking tests. To top it all off, I generally dislike being told how I have to do my job (hello boss), which brings me to the gist of this rant.
Toxic achievement culture
As I prepare for yet another teaching season (hi students), I have been thinking a lot about a book that I read over the holidays by Jennifer Breheny Wallace called Never Enough. In it, Wallace explores the toxic achievement culture that kids are thrown into these days, noting the following: “Today, an avalanche of metrics, measurements, tracking, and sorting can gradually overtake a young person’s existence inside and outside of school.”
While reading it, it made me wonder whether our university is complicit in this as well, as we employ our share of metrics, measurements, and rubrics to assess our students, and pay software companies like PebblePad large sums of money to keep track of “their growth”. On these platforms, we require students to create portfolios and to complete reflection assignments that we judge using rubrics. I suppose this creates the perception that we are educating our students in a meaningful way (and winning over the approval of the accreditors).
Unnecessary work
Never Enough felt like a mix between Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and The Carpenter, where the concerted argument is, we are focusing too much on measurable achievements and in doing so, harming the younger generation. Not only are we harming the younger generation, but we are potentially overpaying for that privilege and adding unnecessary work for the teachers.
If we assume for the sake of the argument that the mission of any university is to prepare its students for the future, it makes sense to invest our limited resources into activities that actually benefits our students. According to research cited by Wallace, here are some examples of college experiences that have an “outsized positive influence” on future success of students: 1) Taking a course with a professor who made learning exciting; 2) having a professor who cared about the student personally; 3) having a mentor who encouraged the student to pursue personal goals; and so on.
Good software
What you do not find on this list are things like “having a good software that keeps track of the student’s reflections” or “rubrics that measures their writing skills better”. Yet, this is what we are investing our time and resources into. In the time it takes for teachers to learn how to operate a new software like PebblePad or to grade hundreds of assignments using rubrics designed by administrators, we could be talking to students and engaging with them in a more meaningful way.
Engage
Wallace stresses the dire need for young adults today to feel like they matter. In a grinding toxic achievement culture where their worth is attached to their performance, teachers filling out rubrics to assess their development isn’t how we can show them that we care, or that they matter. Take it from someone who has jumped through various achievement hoops, only to end up as a forty something year old, who still hasn’t figured out how to uncouple self-compassion from external validation. We should be encouraging teachers to engage, excite and connect with students. Not to check boxes on some software behind a computer desk.
Wallace concludes that students thrive in warm environments where they feel like they belong. As I prepare to embark on another 6 months of teaching, the question that will be living in my mind rent free is this: How do we make our students feel like they matter?
Mark Kawakami, assistant professor at the Faculty of Law