Krista Tippett: You talked about in tenth grade how you fell in love with Walt Whitman. I think that’s the first line of your book. And I kind of think, part of what you are feeling and in pain about is that enough people aren’t falling in love with Walt Whitman or whoever their Walt Whitman would be.
Denise Pope: It’s so true. And learning for learning’s sake — forget it. If you teach an ungraded class, they don’t do the work. It’s just not set up — the system is not set up for falling in love with Walt Whitman.
On Being, How Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up with Abraham Verghese and Denise Pope
I loved this recent conversation about education, growth, and humanity – Krista Tippett always draws out fascinating observations from her conversational partners.
But this statement from Denise Pope gave me a complex reaction.
Yes, I think it’s true that students are deeply motivated by the grades they are to receive. But I no, I don’t think that’s new. I think grades were designed as the carrot and stick of lockstep education. It was true when I was in high school, it was true when my parents were in high school.
Yes, I think that, in an apparently ultra-high-stakes college application process, students feel required to make their grade the center of their life. But no, I don’t think they are unwilling to learn things without a grade.
In my school district, hundreds and hundreds of high school students participate in music classes every day. And while they receive a grade, I seriously doubt that the grade is a motivator for more than a small percentage of them. They are motivated by the love that inspired Denise Pope to love Walt Whitman. They leave their school year with newfound love for Mozart, Palestrina, Ola Gjeilo, Gene Puerling.
My own students in the Rockford Aces and in GRCC Shades of Blue mostly are not graded. (About half of the “Shades” members receive a grade.) They show up consistently for 3 hours of weekly rehearsal, practice on their own, research, listen, prioritize, cancel other commitments, and show their love in plenty of other ways without being motivated by a grade.
Of course, they are motivated by a passion that predates their first rehearsal with me. And I think that’s where we circle back to lockstep education. Because Denise Pope describes falling in love with Walt Whitman, but not falling in love with algebra, or with choral singing, or with stoichiometry. But I’m willing to wager she succeeded in her math, fine arts, and chemistry classes anyway – and that she was, yes, motivated by her grades. And I’d also wager that her love of poetic language predated her first experience with the “Barbaric Yawp.”
If every student were required to be in four years of choir, then grades would necessarily be a significant motivating factor. And if only those truly interested studied nineteenth-century American poets, then you’d find a much higher percentage of students falling in love with Whitman.
In short: when you decry the fact that grades are an oversized factor in how our young people approach learning, I think you’re actually requiring the one-size-fits-all, stringent, lockstep requirements of secondary education in America. The focus on grades is a symptom of that problem, not a problem of its own.
[I should reiterate that I loved this conversation, agreed deeply with most of what Verghese and Pope had to say, and strongly encourage you to listen to it.]