The United States of Complexity

I spoke with a teacher this semester who had four Latino boys, all in her reading class, all freshmen, all showing evident potential for success. And all four left at different junctures throughout the semester. Each for different reasons. Some involved family and work opportunities. Others involved more private but no less
urgent reasons. There was little notice. They just said they were not returning one day; then were gone. These kids, as with so many other students, were undone by complexities over which they themselves had no control. 

Here is an image used to represent complexity theory. I can see most classes on most days in that pattern.

I had kids this semester who suffered from personal traumas, psychological crises, along with the challenges common to the condition of being a high school senior. I had students who came every day ready to work, committed to the learning; yet I had others who came every day, but always ten or twenty minutes late, or a couple others who came rarely at all. 

One of these students, who experienced great crises this semester, came perhaps 40% of the time. But when this student was there, this student was there, which is to say was present, engaged, attentive. The final for this class was demanding, much more so than they seemed to believe a college prep senior final should be. (Didn't he get the memo?! This semester is supposed to be chillaxed, man.)  This particular student showed up for the final, wrote the two best essays in the class, then left into the vacation, leaving me with a set of very complex questions to answer when it comes to how to assess the work.

This final, I should mention, was based on an article about Abercrombe & Fitch and the policies they use to choose their models and their employees. At one point, when discussing this article, this class of thirty-five seniors and I realized that not one of us had what the Abercrombe & Fitch representative in the article called the "natural, classic American look." 

We have to all think long and hard about what it means to be an American as we enter into the new year and how much responsibility we each need to take for what we have now and hope to still have in the future. All those kids in my class are American, but they are living in many different Americas, all of which must be united, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all if we are all to live the lives, enjoy the liberties, and pursue the happiness we all seek amidst the beautiful complexity that is our country, a country the novelist Ralph Ellison called "the great experiment."

Comments

[Tikabelle]

Wow. That article made me twitchy, and I only made it to page 2.

I find What Students Think's comment to be very interesting. I don't know that a student who - for ANY reason - misses 60% of class deserves an A. Of course, you didn't mention if he made up any of his work, so that's a factor as well. But I also don't know that he deserves to fail, which is where the previous comment intrigues me. We teach in a time when grades seem to be very black-and-white, or rather A-or-Fail. There's a reason we have a sliding scale system for grading, and regardless of how anything below an A is perceived, unless it's an F it still represents passing.

I disagree that giving his kid anything less than an A would cut him to the quick. In fact, as a highly intelligent student who often earned A's when I didn't deserve them, I quickly learned that I could slack off, skip class, and turn in less than adequate work and still get good grades. In my situation, B's or C's would have taught me a better lesson. However, I am pretty sure that *failing* him would teach those things that WST mentioned, and my situation obviously isn't like this student's, who likely had serious reasons he couldn't attend class. A student as intelligent and aware as the one you describe might actually be mature enough to recognize that a C+ grade represented an A for the quality of his work and a D for his attendance, or whathaveyou.

I know this wasn't a request for advice about what to do with this student's grades, and I'm sure that you've already come to a great conclusion that does what's best for the student!

[Clix]

We can't be everything to everyone - and I'm sure you know that, Jim. But it's hard to look at work from a student like this and NOT imagine what s/he might have been able to accomplish if the situation had been different...

[What Students Think]

Please give this poor kid an A. So many of us had experiences beyond our control that negatively influenced our adolescent lives. If he is competent to move on to the next class, then holding him back is punishment for not following the rules, showing the rules are more important than the student, even when they are counter-productive to assessment of his work. I'm a writer. I was given a D- when it became known that the teacher was following a little-known policy to mark as absent anyone who wasn't in class when the role was called. It was a big campus and I had something truly horrific happen to me that really I should have been in therapy for but of course didn't divulge. Just a few of these and I was marked down to nothing. After three you lost a grade per absence. I have never forgotten the feeling of being taken advantage of twice that year. Not giving him an A will teach him something much more powerful, that academia is a petty and nearsighted enemy to be survived instead of a resource where he can flourish. The point of education is to irrigate deserts. There's no jungle left to cut down, you'll be cutting to the quick. We're already out there in our seats, sifting sand.