Already a week into this month, closing in on the end of this first quarter of school, tormented by the idea of grades.

Arguments for the necessity of grades bore me. I know them all, and I grant them a certain validity within their own limited range of vision:

Grades are:

• desired by students as a measure of achievement relative to other students in that class
• required by colleges as emblems of student ability
• demanded by parents and students alike as fit and proper payment for effort, accomplishment, and tuition
• required by The State as evidence of institutional soundness

And so on.

A grade might motivate and reward a person to perform this or that task to the best of her ability (or punish for failure to do so), but what in the long run is learned? (some indicate that Reward and Punishment both extinguish motivation.)

A grade is literally dumb. It cannot speak of a person's actual passion or curiosity in a given area. It might be able to point crudely in a general direction. I consistently received rotten grades in philosophy courses, yet those courses stoked my brains. A grade lives on another planet, a universe queerly askew from our own bloody hot earth.

What has this student done? Written a paper, delivered a presentation, composed a poem, responded to a series of questions? Slap a grade on it. Even when the criteria are clear, the rubric specific, The Grade remains eerily abstract and impure in the mind of teacher and student. The Grade leans wheezing over the paper, drooling and inarticulate. The Grade is a cold stone over a pit of aborted possibilities.

Enough of that.

I should be reading and grading now. I should not be typing this.

I was feeling crappy this week (must have been entertaining some little flu critter), but I'm feeling better now, thank you. I am all lost in living for school. My brain is a sea of planning and figuring and hoping and reading and responding and ... grading.

I am particularly hot on the trail of writing by women which might be relevant to our AP Lit question "Where is Here?" since some in the class raised a valid point about the overwhelming masculinity of our authors. I am considering Willa Cather, for one. And Jamaica Kincaid. And Sandra Cisneros. And Virginia Woolf.

After dinner tonight, Jay and I attended the CHS Drama Club's evening of three one-act plays. Some revelations. The effort, joy, and artistry of performances like these expose The Grade in all its shabbiness and irrelevance.