A philosophy professor friend once told me about the greatest regret he had from all his years in the classroom. Early in an Intro to Philosophy course, he tasked his students with writing an essay in response to a prompt he shared. One of the papers got a C and my friend wrote “This is recycled Plato” across the top of the paper. Later in the semester, he realized that this student had never read or studied Plato. What they had done was to arrive at and deftly use the same methodology for systematically confronting an idea and carrying it out to its logical conclusion. This student had done the same thing, on their own, that made Plato one of the greatest thinkers of the western world.
And he gave them a C for their efforts.
That realization was truly horrifying. So much so that there wasn’t just one lesson he learned from that experience; it informed his approach to teaching forever after.
“One important lesson,” he said, was that “It’s easy to grade papers when you’ve seen it all before.”
The implication, I think, was that it shouldn’t be what you know that matters, but what the student themselves achieve. To miss that is to dismiss the reality of the student’s accomplishment.
We may not have the time to actively mentor all our students, but we ought to find ways to assess their performance and achievements based on where they truly are when they sit in our classrooms. This isn’t the “Everyone has struggles you know nothing about” line that’s so popular on social media (though that is always worth consideration); this about learning to see and meet our students where they are.
Only when we can do that, do we make it possible for them go further.
