MONEY, POWER, GRADES

We look down on students obsessed with their grades. “Don’t they understand,” we ask one another, “that, beyond a certain baseline, all that matters is learning?” Unless they are going to apply to graduate school. (Unless they are like us.)

Say that companies structure power relations between employees and employers so that employers own and control the actions of employees, as best they can. The medium of this control, in a very significant way, is money. Of course, there are other reasons workers work: shame, pride, or personal satisfaction. But power makes workers work when they don’t want to and power inflects almost every single employee action. Workers might send the report anyway, but it is concern about money that will make the formatting correct. So money is important, alongside benefits, work environment, and other things.

Like jobs, classes are very strongly structured by one medium of power: grades. Students may want to learn, at a given place and about a given topic, but they may also want to sleep, doodle, chat with those next to them, or zone out. Most do not want to offend the professor, out of a well-trained sense of respect for elders, teachers, and people in front of the classroom. Most do not want to get into trouble, whatever that might mean. Most would rather keep their time in class as simple as possible, and minimize the amount of time they spend outside class working for a course.

Grades are what students risk when they step out of line, and grades give the instructor authority when things come down to it. Some students try not to worry about grades, but, for different reasons, have little in their life of clearer importance. Many are living in a total institution, others depend on parental support that’s conditioned on grades, many have not tested the bounds of their current lives and doubt there is much to be gained by trying now, others are proving to themselves that they have self-worth. Many will say they do not care about grades, or have already decided their grade in the class doesn’t matter. Even they still ask about grades and even in them we can incite worry by invoking grades.

We tell students not to worry about grades. It is a part of the instructors’ game of power to suggest students forget the grade and look to learning or good use of their time this month. For students already concerned about grades, forgetting about grades imperils their grades, and is not worthwhile. For students open to the idea, teachers ask them to act for self-improvement rather than out of regard for the major medium of power in the classroom. This is quite a request. Have the students ever really done this before? Acted for self-improvement rather than out of obedience? There are so many things one might do in a day, what should a student choose if the goal is learning in life rather than getting grades in a class? What should a student be interested in?

Asking students to learn for love of learning is like asking workers to work for love of working. As long as the grades (or, for workers, monies) are in order, it's a fine reason. But a person’s love for learning can point in a very different direction from what the teacher would like to see from student behavior, and then grades will drop and students will need great faith that learning is a proper goal. It is much easier is to believe in obedience to a system than to take the risk that its mission might be a good goal in your own life.

The one exception to this, of course, is students who can be creative and still get good grades. Such a student works for grades in addition to their free learning, and therefore has the resources (free time, strong background, “natural talent”) to secure comfortable grades AND pursue learning for its own sake.