By Vanessa Broadbent
Oliver Chronicle
If you asked any of my 20-something-year-old peers how good at math each one of us should be, no one would be able to give you an answer because there isn’t one. Same goes for writing, or drawing, or how much we remember about Canadian confederation. But somehow all of us have remembered the right amount of everything to get by until now.
This isn’t hard to imagine when you picture a group of young adults, but swap it out for a class of seven-year-olds and suddenly there’s an expectation for exactly how much math each child should know and how many words they’re expected to be able to spell.
Currently, elementary schools in School District 53 are testing out the province’s new reporting order for students up to Grade 9. The order, along with including more detailed feedback to parents and student evaluations, drops the use of letter grades and instead marks students on a scale from emerging to extending.
Read more: School trustees give support for new provincial Student Reporting Policy
For students in Grade 3 and under, not seeing letter grades on report cards isn’t anything new and within the district it’s only in place up to Grade 7 and only in some schools.
The new reporting order is replacing an archaic model that’s been in place for too long; categorizing children by letter grades, which differ from teacher to teacher, based on how good they are at regurgitating information they’ve memorized and will shortly forget seems like a waste of time for everyone involved.
Simply knowing more information than your peers doesn’t get you hired anymore because everyone you’re up against now has access to the same knowledge, as long as there’s Wi-Fi. What’s more important is teaching students the critical thinking skills that will be needed to figure out the jobs they’ll have that haven’t even been created yet, something that the new curriculum, which the reporting order complements, focusses on.
But what about the need to expose kids to the harsh reality of failure at a young age? God forbid they live their entire childhood without having the word failure hanging over them in addition to everything else they’re learning to navigate at a young age. Besides, is telling a child they’re failing fair when outside of school no one ever marks your progress with a red “F” again?
If our education system consists of assigning students a percentage and letter grade based on a set amount of facts and formulas they’ve memorized, then the letter grade system has already failed us because I’m pretty sure I couldn’t pass any math quiz after elementary school level anymore. At least in the real world there’s Google.
