November 2005
Mark the Bully By Joe Bower "Students should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information” ~Jerome Bruner Recently, I have taken a real interest in researching the effects marks have on learning. My research has led me to believe that marks sabotage learning in the name of achievement. I believe learning to be the objective of any sound education system: therefore, anything and everything we do as teachers, students and parents should focus on emphasizing and protecting learning at all costs. Consider the following anecdote: What if your son or daughter was being bullied? Imagine your son or daughter striving to learn what the teacher instructs, but after every assignment, your child was put down and judged by a student named Mark. In fact, Mark would line up all the students of the class and rank them according to their ability and performance. Your son or daughter hates this, and yet they are subjected to put downs and ridicule after every assignment and test. They try to learn as the teacher asks them, but after every attempt, Mark lashes out. Mark’s relentless harassment eventually places enough pressure on your child that they see each assignment as a chore. They stop taking on challenges in school just so they can ensure success. They stop thinking creatively and instead are happy to mindlessly repeat what Mark wants to hear. They can’t stand Mark’s ridiculing and begin to cheat off of other students, even though they know it’s wrong. After receiving a low grade on an assignment, Mark calls them dumb, and your son or daughter starts to believe Mark is right. They see failure as something that should have never happened. They believe that they can never afford to make a mistake because Mark is always waiting to judge them. To avoid Mark’s bullying and teasing, your child sees their friends as mere speed bumps to pass over to achieve a higher rank. They even establish a fake relationship with their teacher that includes sucking up and brown nosing, hoping that they can increase their grades, again to avoid Mark’s wrath. What would you want the teacher to do with Mark? Remove him from class and discipline him? Or would you rather the teacher use Mark as a tool to motivate and sort the students of the class to achieve greater success? After all, those with top
grades must feel really good about themselves in knowing that they won’t have to suffer Mark’s reign of terror. If only your son or daughter would understand that if they just worked harder, they could avoid the consequences. Unfortunately, what your son or daughter doesn’t realize is that Mark is not a real person. Mark is really marks. Many teachers use marks to develop a class average on a curve, and this class average does not allow everyone to achieve an 80% or 90%. This means that your son or daughter’s effort may have less to do with their success than we might have hoped. Because students are so rigorously compared to one another by teachers, students and parents, only a select few may achieve honors, while the rest are ranked somewhere in the middle or bottom, no matter how much effort they put forward. In this system, ability to achieve high grades is more important than learning or effort.