Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Most recognize the weaknesses of "teaching to the test," but the exhausting pressure to cram is only part 1 of the problem; part 2 is that bubble tests disappear from life after school while self-direction, courage, creativity, & open-ended problem-solving become crucial.

The demand for normally distributed student rankings is central to the problem. Diverse, self-directed projects might be hard to numerically score/rank, but "I can't evaluate a student's competencies based on real work" would be an inane claim.

I was once arguing that students should be able to code their own projects, even marketable products, without being limited by a rubric that might create tension between "best score" & "best product." My acquaintance: "But then how do we know they've really learned to code?"

Well, usually these rubrics are designed, not, because instructors are incapable of evaluating work, but because it is *very* difficult to evaluate work fairly. If everything is your best guess the standard you use on the 20th project is guaranteed to be different than the 1st.

All this assumes that it is in some sense necessary to *rank* students rather than evaluate their progress individually, which — whether fair or not — has a lot of arguably concerning social effects

While ranking is really toxic even "evaluating their progress" goes too far in my view. If a child starts a project it is *their* project. The proper role of an educator is to help it according to the *child's criteria* - not to judge whether it fits a preset agenda.

Lots of people have asked me to explain things they think I know. No one has EVER asked me to evaluate their progress. Who does that?