4th
A quick note about the meaning of grades
First quarter report cards came home today.
If you have kids in elementary school, you may be forgiven for wondering what happened to the grades: C, D, and F. When I was younger, the debate was whether C meant “average” or “you got 75% of the answers correct.” No more. Nowadays, grades are all about performance compared to “grade level expectations.” It’s not enough to build expectations into course material and exams. Actual grades have to be expressed in terms of the norm as well. Think about that for a few minutes. Let it sink in. It’s devastating.
Alright. Here’s the new math:
Advanced (A) - Exceeds grade level expectations
Proficient (P) - Performing at grade level expectations
Basic (B) - Progressing towards grade level expectations
Below Basic (BB) Improvement needed to meet grade level expectations
So, look: I don’t know what any of these really mean. Depending on how far grade level expectations have slipped, my kids could be earning A’s while failing to learn a thing. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen such inflation at my kids’ school.
Why does this bug me? Well, picture our kids’ future: Outmoded notions like excellence, mediocrity, and failure have been discarded. The drive to excel has been muted by our evolved inability to define excellence in the first place. My kids have grown up, not knowing the triumphant feeling of having really nailed something, but instead striving to say to themselves, “at least I did better than the rest of these chumps.” And why not? Raises and promotions are given out on exactly this basis, even as the businesses of tomorrow unwittingly race one another to the bottom of an ever deepening achievement pit.
And I’m about 70, and I’ve had two strokes already, having watched our culture crumble far faster than I’d ever imagined it would. So I’m driving to the one brick and mortar pharmacy left in town, to try to get my ancient Clotnomor script filled before another week goes by. It’s a retro place - built in the 2030’s as a kind of Hard Rock Café tribute to big pharma government - but by some legislative quirk, it’s allowed to fill prescriptions. Sure, they only stock a handful of drugs, and most are only there as props and are fifteen years past their expiration date, but they’re better than taking my chances with standard meds. Those pills from OmniAll Pharmaceuticals, no one knows what you’re going to find in them.
Everyone’s honking and passing me as I drive. I get the finger 20 times inside of a two minute span. It’s like that one old film movie with that Wilson brother, I think. But I’m doing 85 mph and that’s more than fast enough. These impatient kids can stuff it. And they do! A quarter mile up the road, it’s as if the cars are just disappearing. And in the final seconds that pass before I, too, plunge over the edge of the unmarked, destroyed bridge, I remember when I first realized the world was going to hell. It was 1990. I was a freshman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My 4-D class watched as Shane concluded his performance piece by shitting on the classroom floor. I gagged and smiled. It was so disgusting, a flagrant middle finger at the very idea of art. Yet it was received with adulation by nearly everyone in that classroom audience. In fact, I recall, Shane’s “piece” was awarded an A.
And that was back when an A meant something.
