The Grading Podcast

Patrick: Because the questions that, that would be challenged, the challenges that will come to an instructor trying to have grading reform will come from historical context. And that context is, is the history of this country, right? And free white men over the age of 21 who own property. That’s who could vote. So that’s the history that we live in. And it’s all, it all comes down to this system wants to keep itself running. And it will do so to co op even my best efforts and yours unless we interrupt it, unless we become conscious of the system and its operation and, and work to interrupt it. So if somebody’s asking me, I can’t rank people, I say, why would you want to? I don’t and I’m out. So that’s how I’d respond to that question, Sharona.

Boz: Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer. Whether 12, whatever your discipline is, Whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am a little stressed. As of the time of this recording, we are going into finals exams for the first semester that I had this extended coordination job. So between midterms and finals, I have written 70 versions of exams in the last two weeks across five different courses and six different grading systems. And I’m not quite done. I have some edits to make this weekend. So I’m a little bit on the stressed side. How are you doing?

Boz: Well, I’m just the opposite because at the time of this recording a few days ago was my last day of actually teaching at Cal state. We have finals next week, but with our system and stuff, I don’t actually have to physically be there, so I’m done for the semester. Other than. a whole bunch of grading.

Sharona: I have words for you, but they are not reasonable to be on the podcast right now because this is the clean version. I will share those with you offline. Yes. Okay. Now I’m mad. And we have another guest on the podcast, which is one of my favorite things to do is to interview someone and talk to them about their system. So I’d like to welcome Dr. Patrick Morris to the podcast. Welcome, Patrick. Is that okay to call you that?

Patrick: Please call me Patrick. I’m not a doctor, but I play one at school.

Sharona: Okay. Sorry, Sir patrick Morris. I’ve, I’ve had to, I shouldn’t have assumed. So. Patrick was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota, enjoyed a 12 year career as an actuary first there and then in Georgia. And now he’s in his fourth decade of a second career. in the classroom on the math faculty at Foothill College. Listeners to the pod may recognize that Jeff Shinske and Jeff Anderson are both in that general vicinity and they have this amazing cadre of people. Patrick has also served as an officer at the Academic Senate, the faculty chair of the Equity and Education Council, and his professional focus is on the intersection of racial equity and the field of mathematics. And he talks about that nationally at conferences, and he’s working on a book, which is amazing. He also likes to road bike with friends, including, he’s clearly another one of us crazy people, he’s ridden from Seattle to Portland, 207 miles, in one day. For fun. So welcome Patrick. So glad to have you.

Patrick: Thank you Sharona, I feel very welcome.

Boz: So one of the things Patrick that we always like to ask a new guest is just how did you get into this world of grading reform?

Patrick: Yeah. I, I came to teaching as a second career. I think you mentioned that. And grading didn’t make any sense to me. So it was kind of a rational decision and of course it’s shaped by my own experience with grading and through say elementary school and high school, . I held grades in essentially contempt. Contrary kind of kid. I was book smart and, and really didn’t care about the system that was, that was telling me whether I was smart or not. I, I had enough of that on my own. I had an understanding of that about myself, and that came from my family, of course. Another thing I got from my family was a, a real powerful distrust and suspicion of authority. So school didn’t really speak to me. I, I did it because I was legally required to and that kind of stuff. And I got good grades. I, I could get an A anytime I wanted. put my attention to it. And I even remember one high school teacher at graduation. I mean, my senior year of high school, it was, I was a National Merit Scholar. I had a full ride scholarship and I wasn’t even going to go to college.

And you want to talk about A, privilege, and B, ornery, and all kinds of messed up there. My sisters talked me into it. My older sisters who had been to college, they said it’s not like high school, so just go. And so, so I had an experience like that. But the grade that reminded, that, that came to mind was my high school English teacher, second semester. It was an English class that’s required for graduation. I imagine that I attended, I don’t know, twice a week. Laughter. It’s supposed to be five days. I was maybe there twice a week and my English teacher, I didn’t even know I was going to graduate. So, cause I didn’t know I was going to pass this Shakespeare class. It was a really cool class. I liked the class, right? And the instructor, the teacher, I met me at graduation, like in caps and gowns outside at the reception. And she said to me Patrick, if I had graded you on what you wrote, you wouldn’t be here today. And so I, she gave me an A. It’s like, okay, she gave me an A. Right. So I knew that grades had this element of arbitrary in them anyway. My, yeah, my own experience with grades was not, not positive or affirming or anything like that. I saw them as, as a ridiculous requirement and, and not. Not humane, right? I mean, it’s so, that would have been my understanding at that time.

I had a client who was the caricature of the monopoly plutocrat, you know, the mustache and top hat guy, he was that guy. He owned several textile mills throughout the South in the U S I was working in Atlanta and the Reagan tax cuts were changed the rules for pensions and benefits. And I gave advice to this client to be able to shift some of the financial risk for the benefits from the pension plan itself onto the employees. Now the story that I told that is actually true is that in the aggregates, the employees will do better with like a market based pension benefit. But what’s included in there is the uncertainty of the timing of the retirement and where the market is at that moment is really important. So that’s a risk that’s shifted to the employees. And I’m shifting that risk from a plutocrat to people making $13, 000 a year working in a textile factory. And they don’t have, you know, like if, if it turns out that the market’s down, they can’t work another four years to, to get back up. They don’t have that margin of error. Whereas the pension plan of course does have them.

So anyway, I did that because it’s perfectly legal and all that. And that client loved me and I saved him like Boku bucks on his taxes just that year. And I didn’t get the warm fuzzies about that. You know, it’s like, I don’t really, this is what it’s like when it’s going good. So I, I knew that that, I came to realize, I’d say, that, because it was a process, I came to realize that was not where I was going to spend my life. So I was attracted to teaching and got into it. Moved across the country at that time and was looking. I was actually in California looking for work as an actuary and this was during the first Bush recession. I mean, this is even like ancient history to y’all, right? And nobody could, nobody was hiring.

So I walked into the Ed school in San Jose State, and I talked to the director, and he, I didn’t know, didn’t realize what was happening. He was moving things around so that I could get right into that program. I didn’t have to sit on the wait list. Just from our conversation in his office. So there’s tons of privilege and serendipity and all kinds of things going on in there, but I got into teaching and I had a sociologist who shamed me into learning about the world. Really, I would say, you know, she, she’s the one, she’s a graduate professor who threw me out of class for for not reading the assignment, but speaking up as though I did. And you want to talk about white man privilege right there, right? And this woman was having And she threw me out of the class and I was humiliated. It’s like how does that,. Anyway, but after that I did my reading right, and she was, that, that was what I needed. And she, as a teacher knew that’s exactly what I needed at that time. And she gave it to me. And that was a great, great gift of, of humility and just having a little sense of where my own positionality in the world.

Anyway, so I get to, I’m trying to answer your question, believe it or not. I’m getting to, I come into teaching and I’ve got to do these things called grades. And it’s like, I know from my own experience how ridiculous they are. And they didn’t make any sense. And I wanted to support learning. Right? And, and I struggled and I did what everybody else had done, I had 90, 80, 70, 60, you got two midterms and a final. I mean, I did all that, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me even then. So I’d say since I started teaching in the 90s, I’ve been thinking almost nonstop about assessment and grading. And you don’t have to think very long before you see the ridiculousness in our system. No, no, no, the purposeful intention of what our assessment and what grading does. And I’d say it’s to rank people and to reinforce dominant hierarchies. That’s, that’s it. And I want no part of that, right? So I came to, I came to what we call grading reform just kind of, just organically. And I’ve been struggling, I’ve felt alone a lot over the course of my year of my years. But yeah, that’s what got me here.

Boz: So a little bit of my past in history. You know, I was one of those students that was in, especially in high school, just great in math. Never, never really struggled. And the only suggestions, and the only guidance I got from my school was, Oh, you’re good in math. You should go into engineering. So that’s what I started off when I went to college, but I’ve always said, had I known more about actuary science, I might not have ever become an educator. So I am thrilled to hear that you were an actuary scientist and it did drive you away, because I don’t think I would have been as happy. I’d have been a lot richer, but I wouldn’t have been as happy as if I, you know, spent my working life as an actuary. But I’ve always said, had I known more about actuary science, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten into education.

Sharona: Well, and I feel like I’m in a, in a twisted time travel episode right now. Cause I think I’m looking at two versions of Bosley that are about 10 years apart. From everything you were saying, I’m like, yep, that’s him. Yep, that’s him. So I’m just going to leave now and let the two of you talk now anyway.

Boz: Yeah, it does sound like you and I probably had, we probably would have been really good friends or would have hated each other if we were in high school together. Cause it sounds like we were very similar.

Patrick: High school. Yeah. That’s hard to say. You, you probably wouldn’t have liked me in high school. I didn’t even like me when I was in high school. That’s funny.

Boz: But I joke, especially with my high school students about how much of an arrogant you know what I was as a student, my teachers loved me when I was out of their class. But when I was in their class, especially my math, Oh, my math teachers hated me when I was actually in their class.

Sharona: Well, cause he was an arrogant shit to their faces.

Patrick: Arrogant, punk ass kid. Oh, yeah. I got you. Yeah, I’m, I’m with you, boss. I, I think I can I can relate here. Yeah.

Sharona: So, let me ask you a follow up question to your origin story. So, I saw from your bio, I’m not gonna say the years, but you’ve been doing this a little long. You’re actually not that far ahead of me, to be fair.

Patrick: Okay.

Sharona: You’re not that far.

Patrick: I think it’s more than a minute. We can say that. I’m 66, okay?

Sharona: Yeah. But I’ve been teaching in my own classroom since I was 19. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As far as actually being in the classroom, I actually have you beat because that was 89. When you said you understood that grades were BS, what did you do about it when you first got in the classroom?

Patrick: Yeah I was scrambling. I was making stuff up. I was improv. I would try new policies every quarter, every term. I had a year when students would grade their own homework and they’d just tell me what they got. And that was that like didn’t go over well with the administration at the school. Cause I’m not being rigorous enough and all that crap. I tried Self reported grades, I tried, I, oh God, I used, I used. Embarrassingly complex

Sharona: That is a common problem with every mathematician who does this.

Patrick: What’s that?

Sharona: Every mathematician who tries grading reform loves to create the Taj Mahal of structure.

Patrick: Oh, I would put my, I’ll put my stuff up with them. Cause I’ll tell you what, I got two degrees in mathematics and a career building and using mathematical models. I came to teaching, I said, well, I’ll just make a mathematical model of student learning. How hard could that be? Right? Right. That’s where I am. So I mean, if there is a quantitative assessment policy, a grading policy that’s got to do with quantitative information, I’ve done it. I mean, I’ve done, you know, late graduated, late penalties, right? Points for Oh God, I’ve used adjustments for the temperature of the room. Like my own. I’ve made, I use standard error of measurement in my grading. Who does that? Okay. I had, you know, a seven step process and it was all, I worked it, y’all, I got a deep bag of quantitative tricks and I pulled out all the stops and it took me 15 years to realize that quantitative grading is based on the belief that if we get the points right, the learning will follow. And that is false. Points get absolutely in the way of the grades. I knew every conversation I had was not about learning with students, conversation with students. They were always about the points. Yep. So, and I’m saying forget the points. They can’t forget the points because I impose the points on them, right?

Sharona: I love what you’re saying right now because you took, we give a talk called grading as the misuse of mathematics and the measurement of student learning.

Patrick: I’ll back you on that. Yeah.

Sharona: Okay. Well, I, I need to pick your brain because as bad as we make it, you almost went far worse.

Patrick: Oh hell yeah. Deep, deep.

Sharona: I love this and I’m going to contrast it with, I am looking right now at your current grading policy. This is the most extreme use of emojis I have ever seen and I am in love with emoji based grading.

Patrick: Emoji grading, you bring it.

Sharona: I, I thought I came up with that. Boz, I’ve got to show you this. I’m going to, I’m loving this. So explain in words what I am looking at on this paper that says, this is my current grading policy, which we will share the show notes.

Patrick: Okay I’m give me a, give me a clue. I’m not looking at it right now. What’s.

Sharona: So I see a huge number of yellow icons. Oh, yeah. That’s three different kinds and a narrative around

Patrick: that. So smiley faces upside down. Smile face. Yeah.

Sharona: No, I’m seeing lemons. I’m seeing bees and I’m seeing owls.

Patrick: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah,

Sharona: he’s like, which emoji? What are you talking about? I just put the link in the chat for you, Boz.

Patrick: The bees and the owls and the lemons. That’s what my grading scale is about. Bee work. I named, okay. Talk to elementary school teachers because they know stuff. I was trying to get away from letter grades. I don’t want to use A’s and B’s because they, this came after the getting away from quantitative. But I wanted to get away from letter grades A and B because they carry a lot of cultural baggage. And they were interrupting learning, right? So I want to, I see those as being as being not supporting learning like I want. And so I was talking to a Fourth grade teacher. God, elementary teachers know stuff. He says, so call them Bobcat and Aardvark. Right? For the B and the A. Give little animal names to them. And I said, alright, well I call it bee, because, so if you do all the bee assignments, B, right? It’s a B. You get a B.

Sharona: A honey bee.

Patrick: You get, it’s a honey bee. You get a, you do all the bee work, you get a B. You get a B in the class, right? And we’re the Foothill Owls, so if you want, if you want a an A grade, and you want me to record an A on your transcript, you need to do all the owl work too, because you’re a Foothill Owl. So the bee work is I guess in the day we would have called those quizzes. I don’t know. And they’re every day, right? They’re every class period. It’s how I communicate content. I don’t, I don’t lecture at all, right? I just give them a problem and mess with it. And resources and then they work collaboratively and come up with it. And that’s the B work, right? That’s the stuff in class.

The owl work is more more involved. And it takes place outside of class. And that’s it. That’s the B. And you want to get an A in the class, you do the bee work and the owl work. And that’s an A. Now the lemons. Okay. Now the lemons are my attempt to capture other information that is relevant to the class to discerning learning that doesn’t show up on my assessments. And that means the conversations I have with students, I mean, who, what teacher who’s been in the classroom for more than a minute has not had a conversation with a student who scores poorly on exams or has not shown any kind of meeting outcomes according to the traditional measures, but you have a conversation with the student for a moment and they’re dropping knowledge, right? They got this. And it’s like I’ve heard a really penetrating question. And sometimes like, damn, I never even thought about that. So that kind of conversational experience is super common. Have you had that experience? I mean, I don’t want to assume.

Boz: No, I absolutely. We’ve had this kind of discussion with different groups of educators. But yeah, some of the best evidence of learning has come from conversations and what rule carved in stone says that we can’t get evidence of learning from anything outside of a test. And I mean, we’ve had two different PE teachers on that talked a lot about that’s majority of the grade is just having a conversation, a 10 to 30 second conversation with their students towards the end of the period about how much effort they thought they put in to the PE class. So yeah, it’s, you get so much more, not just, evidence of learning, but also evidence of gaps and evidence of misunderstanding.

Patrick: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Boz: So, why so many educators are like, Well, yeah, but that wasn’t a test, so it can’t count.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, and, and you’re, you’re right on, you’re right on, Robert. Educators at the highest level know the value of conversation. You think about the gold standard of assessment, it’s the PhD dissertation defense. It’s like you standing there in front of five of your professors and they’re grilling you in a conversation, right? They know you can’t hide. You can’t hide in a PhD defense, right? So you got to bring it and and they will know and that’s how they discern at the highest level That’s how they assess. So yeah, the information we get from conversations with students is like an oral exam. We don’t allow it to be, it didn’t hit my test, right? Okay, we’ll get more of that, get more of that.

But this is my lemons. I’ve got two columns in my grade sheet, one for lemons from you and lemons from me. So when I have one of those conversations, I just mark it in my grade book, you get a lemon. And if you get enough lemon, lemons are like extra, they’re like bonus, right? I don’t know, extra credit? No, they’re not extra credit because I’m not assigning anything for them, right? I’m just trying to be aware and capture evidence when I see it. So I’ll make a lemon from me. Now there’s also a lemon from you. Students can give them to each other. And I’ve got a practice on each bee work, where the last question is always please name the people who were helpful to you and tell me how they helped, right?

So when I get a real, not just name their friends, right, but when they name someone and say this is what they did, that’s evidence of learning for the other person, right? Because if someone can explain the concepts to another person, that’s evidence of learning. So I take students names, they can give lemons to each other. And then somebody always asks, can I give a lemon to myself? No, no, you can’t give a lemon to yourself. You give lemons to other people and you get lemons from them by being helpful in a way that they find helpful. So try that, right? Building the community based learning. So the lemons are, I can use them to support a higher grade. Like if somebody missed a couple of bee assignments, but I see a bunch of lemons there, I can say, yeah, all right, you’re still, you’re still in the B range. Yeah, I can still give you a B. I can still support with the evidence that I have, I can support a B, even though you didn’t complete all the bee work, right? All right, so that’s the lemons, that’s the owls, that’s the bees. I don’t know.

Sharona: So I think what I’m hearing though, there’s a lot to unpack here, but I think one of the things, if I were someone who was not as advanced in doing some of this work, I would be thinking something like, well, how can you tell in this informal evidence gathering how one student does against another student? Hmm, right? Yeah, because that’s a lot what are tests and assessments do? Is there these common things that students take, and I can compare this student’s work to that student’s work.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the that’s the purpose of of academic assessment is to rank people. And that goes way back to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. Like, let’s rake a few grains of wheat from the chaff. It’s elitist and I don’t want any part of that. So I would say, if you’re worried about ranking people, look within. Go find out why you got to do that and question yourself because that’s a false choice. I will not, I will not go down that path anymore. I’m not here to rank people. And those rankings are absolutely a dominant culture. And I’m going to say racist, sexist, heteronormative, everything, all the oppression you want to mention. They’re all there to reinforce dominant hierarchies. That’s what the ranking is for. And I think my colleague Jeff Anderson will trace it all the way down to anti democratic capitalist forces. It’s like, yeah, that’s what we live in.

And so I am here to discern learning any way I can. And, and being open and honest and receiving and I want to recognize evidence of learning in whatever form students produce. And I want to have an assessment policy that captures evidence when it presents itself. So yeah, I got to be flexible, right? And somebody’s going to say, well, that’s not fair because the other student didn’t have that chance. You know, the other student’s going to have a different chance, right? And, and I get students who never say a damn word in class, but every time someone else in their group is naming them and describing the mathematics that they’ve explained, it’s like, I know they got it going on, right? I don’t need to rank them against anybody else. But, you know, I want to pull back on that ranking. It’s like, what are we trying to do here? The purpose of academic assessment, I’d say, is to rank people and to reinforce dominant hierarchies. Okay, I’m, I’m not in on that. So I’ve just, you know, what is my purpose? My purpose is to discern learning. And what does that mean? I mean, what am I trying to discern? If you think about what is learning, it’s like, I don’t know, it’s a, it’s a psychological event or process. It takes, it’s got neurophysiological effects. It takes place in a sociocultural environment with historical context.

I mean, what do you got to know to be able to assess that. You got to read. You got to know some psychology. You got to know some learning science and cognitive science neurophysiology. You got to know some sociology and some cultural anthropology and you’ve got to know a lot of history. Because the questions that would be challenged the challenges that will come to an instructor trying grading reform will come from historical context. And that context is the history of this country, right? And, and white, free white men over the age of 21 who own property. That’s who could vote. So that’s the history that we live in. And, and it’s all, it all comes down to this system wants to keep itself running. And it will do so to co opt even my best efforts and yours. Unless we interrupt it, unless we become conscious of the system in its operation and, and work to interrupt it. So if somebody’s asking me, you know, I can’t rank people, I say, why would you want to? I don’t. And I’m out. So that’s how I’d respond to that question, Sharona.

Boz: Okay, I want to take a clip of that and like put that on every media site I can find, put that on our website, but yeah, just, mic drop, just all stop right there. It’s all about ranking. And I want no part of it. I absolutely love that. And I want to be a fly on the wall when you and Jeff Anderson are together sometime. I bet you guys get.

Patrick: You know I was his tenure chair. I was the chair of his tenure committee, and I knew, I knew when we hired him, we had a gem, and I resented my formal relationship of evaluator. Because that’s a power dynamic that prevents authentic connection. And when he got tenure, we had dinner, and there was champagne, and it was, it was a celebration of finally, hey, now can we talk? Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because there’s going to be some talk. Yeah. And there has been, and it’s continuing. And, and I can’t keep up with that guy. You had him on the show here, I know. So he is you know.

Sharona: His one hour episode ended up into two hours. Exactly. It’s the only one that had done that.

Boz: And that was completely, completely unplanned. Like Sharona, I and I were halfway through it. We’re texting each other going. Okay.

Sharona: Just keep going.

Boz: Do we need to start wrapping this up or are we just going to let this run? I think we still cut it short at two hours.

Sharona: Yeah. I think we did. I think we did. So, but I’m going to ask, I’m going to be a little devil’s advocate, but also just ask the tough questions, which is what has happened in the classroom? Like that’s all fine and good to say we have these beliefs. What is the result of the students and their mathematical learning?

Patrick: Let’s read what came in yesterday. So this is the final lemon sheet for the quarter. The learning reflection. My prompt is what seems to you to be the most important thing you learned this term? Student work right here. The most important thing I learned this term is that a shift in my learning attitude can greatly impact my efficiency and overall experience. When I approached topics with genuine curiosity and interest. Rather than feeling pressured by exams, I found that I was willing to spend more time on understanding concepts and this made me could retain all these concepts much better. This term taught me the value of learning for enjoyment and growth rather than solely for grades. Right there.

Boz: What, what class was this?

Patrick: That was a discrete math class Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science. You probably caught the language learner Q in there in the diction, right?

Boz: Yeah. Yeah. But so this was, so that’s what a freshman, sophomore level class.

Patrick: Well, yeah, we, we don’t, I’m a community college instructor. Our student body is a flash mob. You know, they come together for one quarter and then they’re gone. We don’t have cohorts, but it would be a lower division course that’s required for computer science majors and also math majors. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: But the point is, it’s a STEM related class, it’s not a random GE.

Boz: No, but it’s an, it’s an early STEM class with a student saying, yeah, what the biggest thing I’ve learned is I can, I can actually appreciate and come into learning for the sole purpose of learning.

Patrick: For enjoyment and growth rather than solely for grades. Yeah.

Boz: Yeah, how beautiful is that?

Patrick: You know, it’s the end of a term for us we got final exams next week and I like to say that, you know We’ve all got a tank You know, it’s filled with I’ll say the F bombs, it’s the F bomb tank, and it’s like when you need one to give, you gotta go dig into the tank and see if you got another one to give, and, and sometimes the tank’s empty and I can’t just give, right? This time of the quarter, it’s like, I, my, my, my, my tank is empty, and then I read things like that, and it’s like, alright, you know, okay, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta refill. Yeah.

Sharona: But how is their actual mathematics?

Patrick: Yeah.

Sharona: Like, again, the stuff is great, and I completely agree with you.

Patrick: Yeah tell me what you mean by that, Sharona.

Sharona: So, it’s a little harder for me in a discrete math class, because I’m not as familiar with the content, so I’m going to switch it over to, say, a calculus class.

Patrick: Calculus class, that’s fine.

Sharona: Okay, a student, that comes out of your calculus class. How’s their calculus compared to a student that might have come out of a calculus class? 15 years ago.

Patrick: I got you. In fact, even this year in other traditional classes. Who did better calculus Gauss or Weierstrass. Now I’m going back into history of calculus and I’m talking as a math folks, so I can drop names like that. Okay. So, so Calculus was originally, and this is, you know, Newton and Leibniz down to Euler and Gauss, it was an intuitive process. They had the idea of infinitesimals, right? You know, dx is a little bit of x. It’s like, we’re not going to get too technical about this, and their understanding was really intuitive. They understood rates of change, and they understood how many Amazing phenomena you can come to understand when you think about how things change a little bit at a time, right? It’s really intuitive and people understand change. It’s like you got any things that change in your life Right. Sometimes they change a little faster than they used to Right? Sometimes they flip around and change the other way altogether. I mean, okay, you’re talking about a derivative, how do things change? So the mathematics of change is what a student will come out of my class with. Now, a traditional math class would be focused on Cauchy and Weierstrass, the 19th century, the later mathematicians who formalized this idea of that had been very much intuitive and profitably thought about intuitively.

And in fact, I had this conversation when I was teaching differential equations, because those students are going to go off and be electrical engineers at Berkeley next year. And they’re going to face professors who will who will expect them to think like Cauchy and Weierstrass formally. And when they’re going to be in there with the ability to think like Euler and Gauss intuitively. And they’ll be able to read a problem or apprehend an engineering problem and see the rates of change working in there. They won’t be able to write it down as a system of partial differential equations, and then apply some technique to it and, and pencil and paper do it. But they might be able to look, re comprehend the situation and on the back of an envelope, sketch a graph of a solution. Right? And then 45 minutes later, their, their classmates doing all the Wolfram Alpha and algebraic manipulation, and they’ll say, hey, it works. And yeah, it works. Because I can see through it. So I’d say that my students, students coming out, the math in my classroom is going to produce, I’d say, a deeper understanding of what mathematics does at the expense of, because how much time we got in a day, and how valuable is it anyway? That’s my question about being able to manipulate equations. Are we really coming to understand or we understand the phenomena being studied or are we just like, you know, getting the answer, right? So it’s, I don’t know, am I answering your question, Sharona?

Sharona: You are, but I think you’re in a way selling yourself short and you took it in a different direction than I intended, which is fine with me because I think your answer is fascinating. But I would argue that even your students ability to do the formal mathematics is better than the majority of the students who went through the traditional. Because I’m going to guess that you allow them to show evidence of that stuff more than once in a semester.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: So, so I think that I think you’re selling yourself short, maybe against the A students, like your A students quote unquote and the A students from a traditional class. Yeah. Maybe the A students from traditional might be able to outperform yours on the formula.

Patrick: Yeah.

Sharona: But how many of your A students do you have versus the B, C, D F students in a traditional class? Because students who get C’s in a traditional class, my experience is there are actually two groups. There are students who should have gotten a B because of what they know, but the system failed them. And then there’s other students who know how to play the game, but actually don’t know anything. But a student who gets a C or a B in your class, I suspect, knows a lot.

Patrick: Well, yeah, they do. They know a lot, a lot. I mean, I get letters from students who tell me, you know, they went to grad school at Penn after taking my class and they tested out of the class that was after that one that they took from me, right? So they probably saved them 30 grand at Penn, right? Okay. So, and, and I got a story student of mine in a differential equations class, I give a problem on the settling time and a, okay, I won’t get too technical here, but for a general audience, mathematicians, I can talk. But it’s there’s an unexpected solution. And it’s like, there is, there is an obvious, There is an obvious answer that turns out on close investigation that, hey, that’s not the best you can do. So it’s like a, an optimization problem. So it’s a settling time of a mechanical system. All right. So one of my students in differential equations at this community college was at, had, had an internship in the mechanical engineering department across the freeway at Stanford. So he’s working with PhD mechanical engineering students and he asked them and they point to the immediately obvious wrong answer. Right? And my student said, you know, I don’t think that’s it. And, and the response from the PhD mechanical engineering student was, Hey, look at that, I got to go ask my professor.

And here’s this punk from, you know, community college that’s like running circles around the freaking PhD students over at this prestigious institution. So yeah, I, I got, my students come out of, they can do some math. Yeah. Cause they understand math and they appreciate it and they’ve what they were learning for enjoyment and growth rather than solely for grades. Yeah. Grades absolutely get in the way of that.

Boz: All right. So I I’ve got to point this out for all of the K 12 listeners, especially the K 12 math listeners. You just heard exactly the purpose of the mathematical practices. I don’t know how familiar you are with common core. But the eight mathematical practices and why we’re supposed to be teaching them and how that’s exactly what the purpose of those are is to look past the mechanical mechanisms of mathematics and look to the intuitive to the learning how to become a mathematician, to look at the world and be able to see how to model it, not just. The rote mechanics of, okay, here’s how you solve a graph or quadratic, or here’s how you find the first derivative of a exponential. Like that was the most beautiful and just unique description of the purpose of the eight standard practices of mathematics.

Patrick: Can I just, like. Can you can that and take it in and have it play in my head when I’m.

Sharona: So we have this little thing called a podcast. The answer is yes, you can.

Patrick: Here’s here’s Robert telling me that yeah, I feel the appreciation and honestly It’s like rain in the desert.

Sharona: Well, and and that’s what across all the disciplines We’re starting to see people like, how do I decide on my learning outcomes? I had that question from a listener this week. How do we figure out what, what standards, how many, and what level of detail? And I’m like, you know what, in the K 12 world, much smarter people than me have done this. They’re called anchor standards in English. They’re called mathematical practice standards in math. They’re called the C3 career civil life and something else I don’t remember in social science. Almost all of the major disciplines some national organization has done this. Statistics has the GAISE standards, the generally accepted standards for statistical education.

Find those, use those. Because you can, now you can’t use them, exactly, please do not just lift the practices and give them to your students, please do not do that, you have to reword them, they have to be student facing, they’re written for professionals and educators, but you, if you do that, it, it clears your mind of what you just said, you know, The mathematical practice standard about modeling. That’s what he was saying. You know, that’s what that is. So distill them, please. I’m begging everyone to go find the people that have done this as large groups because these are not written by one person.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. I got it. I wish I had, I wish I’d heard you 30 years ago. Yeah. Because I’ve been, I’ve been improvising myself. And it’s felt really, really lonely. And the fact is people way smarter than me have done a whole lot on this. And there are resources available. So, yeah.

Sharona: So I just need to, you, you just touched my heart. Because I had someone 30 years ago. Okay. That was my mom. So my mom was doing this work before it was this work. And the impact that she had on my life, now, I didn’t come to the grading stuff until 10 years ago. Eight years ago. Because she didn’t focus on the grading side, but she was one of the early pioneers of collaborative learning, it was called at the time, it’s now called active learning. And she mentored people who are currently active in both the grading field and the inquiry based learning field.

And to see her life’s work pan out in my lifetime. She’s still with us, but she is now disconnected from this world. She’s is in that stage of her life, but it just touches my heart. And I want to be that person now for the you of 30 years ago. So someone who is currently in grad school, who is currently starting on their undergraduate journey on their teaching career and thinking that maybe the things I say now will resonate 30 years from now. Like, that’s just amazing. So thank you for that. And what you’re saying now, you might not have had that person 30 years ago, but you are that person for someone.

Patrick: You’re kind, you’re kind.

Boz: So I did want to ask before we run out of time, I wanted to ask, Sharona in her intro said that you’re in the process of writing a book. So is there any details that you can give us about the book? Is there do we have a release time of when we might want to start looking for it on the shelves?

Patrick: Ooh, yeah, yeah. Okay, well I, I, I introduce myself sometimes and say I’m working on my next book and, and that would of course be my first book. And one thing I know about books is that even a bad book is really hard to write. So I had, I took a sabbatical two years ago and my intention was to complete my sabbatical accountability project for my employer, which was also useful for me, but I, I was, didn’t want to put myself on the hook for it producing a manuscript, right? Because I wasn’t sure. And what has happened in the years, in the last probably four years since COVID is that what I thought about assessment that I was going to put in the book, my ideas were so incomplete as to miss the point. It’s been a powerful learning curve in the last several years for me. I’d say five or six. So pre COVID. And that goes with collaboration with some folks, and, and my own thinking has evolved greatly.

Honestly, what I’ve come to understand that I was missing before is a bigger structure in our field, and I call it the social construction of mathematical difficulty. And it’s connected to I’d say Rochelle Gutierrez from Illinois is is a big writer on on rehumanizing mathematics. Mathematics has been dehumanized. We’ve been separated from our mathematical brilliance. And I can trace that back to Rene Descartes mind body dualism. I mean, there’s just a whole, whole long history of separation of human, of our humanity from our mathematical brilliance, and that is I’ve come to see. That’s a socially constructed hierarchy. People who, math is hard and people who do math are smart, right? And that hierarchy is oppressive and it’s built for a purpose and it’s been co opted by all the other hierarchies. And I’m working on interrupting that hierarchy of the hierarchy of the social construction of mathematical difficulty. And yeah, even a bad book is really hard to write, so I’m not going to give you a release date.

Boz: Well, when you do get to a point of knowing when that is, please reach out and let us know. ’cause I would love to read that book. That’s, that’s been one of those topics that have been coming up, it seems like more and more in the last four or five years. Just this idea of rehumanizing mathematics.

Patrick: That’s that, I get that term from Rochelle Gutierrez Illinois Champaign and Urbana, a brilliant scholar and, and amazing human being, yeah.

Sharona: Yeah, there’s definitely some work in that area that has been done and that I need to read. I’ve just been a little bit head down on on the mathematics as barrier to college success size side, because I’ve been. for the last six years coordinating the non STEM GE class in math. And now I coordinate also the STEM ones. So I now have, I’ve added to my portfolio, the pre calculus and calculus sequence. So that’s, that’s only a few months old.

Patrick: So you’re touching on the history of the, and it’s going to come down to assessment and its role. And what I’m trying to interrupt, there’s the gatekeeper mentality, right? That’s a power structure. And I’ve got a lot, a lot to say, a lot of analysis on what that gatekeeper mentality does to me as an educational practitioner, who’s assigning grades. And what the what another world might look like. Like if I didn’t embrace that gatekeeper mentality. And I’ll tell you what, the there is a narrative, and, and I’m sure it’s, it’s familiar to any teacher of sequence courses, is that in a second semester course, if a student is struggling, there’s an assumption on the part of that instructor that the first semester, the teacher of the first semester course committed a type one error. They, they gave a passing grade to an unqualified student, right? That’s the dominant narrative.

You know, that’s in fact, and when there’s another narrative, there’s a counter narrative that I would love to see get some traction. And that is that the teacher of the second semester course was unable to identify competence in a demonstrably competent student, meaning that the second semester teacher was making a type two error. And they’ll be in denial about that because they’ll say the kid couldn’t do anything on my tests, which is true. But now we’re down to assessment, right?

Boz: Oh, oh my God.

Sharona: You are speaking his love language right now. I just want to say that.

Boz: You have no idea how much. I mean, so, and we just had a conversation last night with a group of educators. I won’t mention names, but you want to talk about gatekeeping, let’s mark things wrong that are actually right because it’s not the way I did it. It’s not the way I taught you.

Sharona: Doesn’t use the right language.

Boz: And you’ll, you’ll, you’ll love this because this is statistics related. This was about what’s what inequality sign to use on a null hypothesis.

Patrick: Right.

Boz: Do you use the equal if your alternative is less than or greater than, or do you use the greater than equal or less than equal?

Sharona: But see, we only teach one of those two because we simplified it for our students and the apps that we use only uses the equal. So God forbid they put the correct null. Using the greater than or equal or less than or equal.

Patrick: I, I hear you. I hear you, Robert.

Boz: But you, you want to talk about gatekeeper mentality.

Patrick: I’ll tell you what, that’s another hour. That’s another hour. Because that leads to me, that leads me to analyze if I give, if I hold that gatekeeper mentality and I’m in denial about the qualified students that I award failing grades to think about that. A qualified student who gets a failing grade. In my view, that is injustice. And that is what we need to interrupt.

Boz: It’s educational malpractice.

Patrick: There’s a lot more here because we, we make, we make inferences on unreliable data. Wrong answers. Students get wrong answers for a lot of different reasons, and the reasons matter for for, for us discerning learning. They’re learning a lot. I mean, that, that one’s deep. I, we’re, if we’re at time here, we’re not going to get to that.

Sharona: We just have you come back on. The although it’s so funny side note, my instructors know, I believe they know, I have a podcast. Okay. I’m relatively confident that none of them listened.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a good bet.

Sharona: I did have an opportunity this week. I had a administrator ask me how they can best support me. And I took the opening and I said, this is what I’m committed to. This is where I need your support. It was a senior administrator. And do you know, I have a podcast. And this person has been working with me for eight years, did not know I had a podcast on this because I’m, for reasons, relatively quiet about it. So I have to assume that that administrator may hear this at some point. And if you’re listening, senior administrator, you know who I am. We love you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your support. Yes, this is what we’re facing.

Boz: Yeah, I would love to have you back on and, and just go into that kind of mentality.

Cause that does sound like it would be a really fun episode, but we are coming up on time. So I, I, well,

Patrick: I’ll wait for your invitation.

Boz: I would have passed this over. Sharona, you got any last questions before we let Patrick do any last thoughts?

Sharona: You know, I have lots of thoughts. I think where I’m going right now is I’m fascinated by this journey that you had about the sophisticated quantitative modeling versus what I would consider a relatively sophisticated qualitative model at this point. And I really appreciate that and your and your vulnerability and sharing that. Cause a lot of us, that have come later to this are like, I’m so sorry to the students in the first 10 years of my career. I apologize. I apologize. I was doing my best. But so that’s my, that’s my last thought. Do you have anything last thoughts that you want to share? Yeah.

Patrick: Yeah. You know if I knew then what I know now, right? We don’t get to go back and apologize to, to our earlier students. And I just heard a very moving expression of that from a mentor, a senior educator by the name of Wade Ellis. And he sat in on one of my conference sessions and shared at the end, he says, you know, I think about the decades that I told students oh, hey, no, it’s easy. Let me show you how. And he said, and I realized what they heard was that. I’m stupid And he said decades of that. And, and I said, Thank you for sharing that and for, for that vulnerability and, and I don’t, I don’t blame him, right? If we knew then what we know now, you know, what would Mark Twain, youth is wasted on the young, right? It’s like, I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, we can’t go back. I would yeah, what closing remarks? We didn’t even talk about, you know, how policies can change. or or what, what qualities they should have or anything. But but Or, you know, what, what’s the purpose? What, what should they do? There’s a lot, there’s a lot to talk about. I just say, you know, think differently. Think, think about your own, your own positionality and how the power dynamics up, play out in your classroom and how much. You know, identity do you have attached to those dynamics and, and, and if you’re really interested in changing, you know, dig in and that might even mean therapy.

It’s like, would help for me, you know? So yeah, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna have any words of wisdom for you. I’m sorry.

Sharona: Other than the hour you just shared.

Boz: Well, I, I want to deeply, deeply thank you. This has been an incredibly fun and I want to thank our listeners but we are coming up on time, so we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, www. thegradingpod. com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website. The grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State system or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.