I don’t want grades to come in between any student and their enjoyment of the learning process.

Some background:

So the other day my students expressed some anxiety over how they would be graded for a speaking assignment coming up. They are preparing in groups of four, speaking in teams of two, but delivering individual speeches. The anxiety was whether their individual grade would be based on how their team did — and, by extension, whether their teammate’s performance would end up affecting their own grade.

I said the usual things (“no, don’t worry, you are being graded individually, not as a group”, etc) but I wondered why my students were so anxious about their grades. I am working through formulating my own grading philosophies, and their anxieties are being factored into my thinking. I can remember being similarly anxious when I was a student like them, albeit perhaps for different reasons. In general, though, I think I’d like to express my grading philosophy as simply as this:

Your grades should not be a factor that comes in between you and your enjoyment of the learning process.

That is, I want students to relax and enjoy learning, and not let the anxiety about grades get in the way of their own interest in learning. I think it can be quite freeing to learn without worrying about being graded… or, put differently, I want the pleasure of the process of learning to be the focal point of the class. Or, another angle is this: I want *both* learning *and* pleasure in the classroom.

Can you imagine taking a class where you are learning a lot AND really enjoying doing so? That’s the kind of class I’d like to teach, and I want my grading philosophy to reflect that kind of simultaneous experience.

And by ‘enjoying’ I guess I don’t necessarily mean just ‘fun’, but more the larger sense of ‘joy’ that can also encompass moments of intense personal transformation or sensual experiences of sorrow, for example, in addition to cathartic moments of meaning.