Week 1 - Post 4: Reading - GETTING an A

Before I really start into the reading, you first need to know something about me: despite being reasonably good at anything I've put my mind to, I am made physically ill by grades and by performance reviews. Seriously... just checking grades on the FSO makes my stomach flip around wildly and my brain come up with all sorts of worst-case scenarios even though chances are the grades will be fine. I even felt anxiety when I had to get my car emission-tested last week, and I wasn't even the one who had to pass the test.

I very rarely fail... and by fail I mean all-out fall on my rear end fail, but the few times I have, the repercussions were severe. We live in a world that so often is unconcerned with how often you do things right and more interested in judging you by your failures. In that kind of world it's frightening to take risks and try something new because what would happen if you tried and it didn't work out? You'd be a failure.

So throughout this reading I found myself thinking about what life would be like if we were more apt to think along the lines of giving an A. Then I wondered what it would be like to be on the receiving end of that A all the time.

Take our experience here at Full Sail. Granted, it's a pretty supportive environment here, but say for the sake of the argument Full Sail could make all their courses pass/fail as opposed to letter graded (without losing their accreditation, that is). What would that mean for us students?

On a whole, we're not a group of people who play it safe with assignments, but I have noticed anxiety spikes when classmates go out on a limb with a project. We want to experiment, but we also don't want to be way off-base with our assignments. In the "giving an A" world it would be okay for us to occasionally misinterpret an assignment. Instead of a bad grade, we'd just get constructive criticism from our instructors and advice on how to tackle assignments like it in the future. There would be no stain on our GPA and no single mark pulling us away from the grade we feel actually reflects how much effort we put into the learning process.

As much as we're learning a lot now, I think we'd learn even more under the "giving an A" system. We'd try even more things and not stress out so much about whether we did what the instructor wanted or not. We could have discussions about where things didn't go right without dredging up the feelings of deep disappointment from receiving a bad grade. We could truly look at a mistake as a learning experience rather than a failure that defines us (sure, people recommend that you look at all failures as learning experiences, but it's pretty hard to do that when that failure is dragging down your GPA).

I think I'd be a less-anxious and more courageous learner in this system.
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On a note related more to the overall reading rather than this particular chapter, I thought I'd share one of my favorite TED Talks. Earlier in our reading it was noted that people limit possibilities when they try to define and measure things according to what they perceive as the one true interpretation. In this video Malcolm Gladwell talks about a turning point in which one scientist stopped looking for the one perfect product and realized he should instead be looking for the perfect products.

Enjoy!