What if Everybody’s Excellent?

Years ago, a friend of mine was working on a book about Maria Mitchell, the nineteenth-century astronomer who discovered a comet as a young woman and is generally acknowledged as America’s first great female scientist.

Mitchell got into teaching by accident. When she heard in 1862 that Matthew Vassar was going to open a college for women, she wrote to ask whether he needed a professor of astronomy.  She was asking on behalf of her brother-in-law, but Vassar misunderstood and interviewed Mitchell for the job. Mitchell’s grading philosophy was simple: as a scientist she did not believe that people’s minds were units that could be evaluated numerically, as Vassar students were at the time. When the college administration required her to assign grades, she decided to give every student the top grade: a 5. Why? Mitchell argued, “If a girl has faithfully studied her lesson and does not know it, she deserves 5 for her industry. If she has not studied, yet knows it, she deserves 5 for her intellect. If she has neither studied nor knows it, she deserves 5 for her audacity incoming before me!” (Bergland 194). 

I read many versions of this book while it was in progress, and this line has stuck with me ever since.  I agree with Mitchell that the project of assigning a number to a student’s intellectual work, whether on an individual assignment or for a semester’s worth of growth, simply makes no logical sense.  And what a relief it would be, I thought, at the end of a long semester, to fill out an entire grade roster with As for every student! 

Mitchell personalized her 5s by writing funny poems for each student at the end of the term, a project that probably took her longer than averaging a bunch of numbers would have (after all, astronomers in those days needed to be crack mathematicians in order to do the calculations that proved their assertions about bodies in distant space), but must also have been much more fun, both for Mitchell and for the students who received them in a celebration at the end of the term. The poems allowed her to respond to each student as an individual, to recognize what each one had brought to the class, and to assess, in a manner that stayed with her students far longer than any mere 5 would have, the intellectual effort and growth the student had experienced while in Mitchell’s class.

I’m not suggesting that we all go out and write poems to our students; besides, the grading programs we use wouldn’t exactly accept verse instead of letter grades!  But I’m inspired by Mitchell to think about what would happen if we followed her lead: developed strong relationships with students that allowed us to understand them as individuals instead of a group for us to rate and sort; gave students credit for coming to our intellectual work with open and eager attitudes; recognized their desire to work and learn instead of seeing them as shirkers trying to get away with the least effort possible. What would change for students if they understood that they mattered to a teacher not as a number, but as a person?

Work Cited

Renée Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).