The story of Kurt

Kurt came in to my geography class a few weeks late, but he was always hanging around school and you know coming into my room at noontime and after school and everything. When it came time for him to do the six week term test, he failed but I thought he's just been coming around and trying and he arrived late and everything and I think that I will just give him some encouragement so I gave him a C-. Even though his grade should have been an F. Okay. 'Cause I was wanting to encourage him. The next six weeks he didn't come around, he didn't do anything, he still failed his tests and I thought this kid thought he found himself a patsy and it would be an easy grader and so I self righteously gave him an F. The next six weeks, why he still didn't come around, he still did failing work and in our school we had this quaint custom of what were called progress reports, otherwise known as pink slips and on there it says check ABCDF. But you only sent it for F, the other things on the pink slip were just smoke screens. One time, this is another funny story, I decided to send progress reports on all of my students, all 150 of them. The guidance went crazy because you don't understand all that we have to do every time we get a progress report and 150 progress reports that Æ s more than we have for the whole school. We just can't process that many. I said wait a minute, you know nobody ever told me you can't send progress reports for a kid who is getting an A. I mean if that's your policy then you ought to let us know. Oh, the counselors were all just terribly upset. I just thought it was kind of a cool thing to give every parent, and I thought I was doing something nice, but I found out that progress reports are really code things for failing. Well anyway, so I had to send Kurt this progress report and another part of this quaint procedure in the school was the kids have to sign there own death sentence so before you send the progress report home, you have to put under the kids nose and say sign here that you acknowledge that your failing. So I called Kurt up and made him sign his death warrant here for getting an F for geography for the semester. And he said can I see you after class and I said sure. And after class he told me that at the end of the first six weeks an Æ d this is the point of what's going on at home, the end of that six weeks, why his mother and father separated and the court gave custody, temporary custody he stayed with his mother during the week and his father on the weekends. And during the week, well his mother told him what a terrible person his father was and on weekends told him what a terrible person his mother was and he was just being ripped apart, limb from limb and so I mean he was very confused, very upset total distracted unable to do any work and no one at school knew anything about that. And what were we doing, here I was self righteously thinking that this kid has just decided that someone is an easy grader without ever checking with the kid to ask him "Kurt, why aren't you coming in anymore?" See how simple that would have been? Real simple. And I didn't do it. Because in my own head I had such confidence in my answer that I never bothered to check. I felt really like a worm and immediately tore up the progress report and wrote notes to all of his other teachers saying hay this kid is having real problems and we need to and I mean the last thing we need to do is pile on and create problems at school and let's figure out some way to help this kid get through this semester so that he can go on with his life. You see what I mean, it's foolish when grades become something that is just about an average. Now ultimately, you're not helping Kurt or anybody else to pass him if he didn't pass. Because he hasn't learned the stuff, but to negotiate with it and provide propping up and give him a little room and ultimately that case give him an incomplete and then when he was able to do the next semester of geography reasonably well-Cs. I then went back and removed the incomplete and gave him a C for the first semester. Now see these things are about judgment they're not about arithmetic. And so don't get trapped by your own arithmetic. So don't get trapped by the statistical nicety of you have to average everything together and divide by 3 or whatever it is to get the grade-don't get trapped by that. Leave yourself the room for professional judgment. Testing should be to confirm professional judgment, not to bypass it.