Grade Me Not: Graded

Monday, April 14, 2014

Graded

for fourteen years

i attended

Graded

The American School of São Paulo

our mascot was an eagle

Graded cost forty

thousand american

dollars a year

fourteen

times

forty thousand

equals

five hundred and sixty thousand

my parents had two children

epoch times ranked Graded number eleven on a list of schools for the extremely rich

cut on dotted line and paste on infant

the promise

bilingual

perfect fluency in standard english

three diplomas

a thousand open doors

maybe a million

my graduating class had eighty six students

sixty two went to ivy leagues

one of them invented instagram

another is ceo of tumblr

three committed suicide before the age of twenty five

there are no eagles in sao paulo

1 comment:

LarissaApril 17, 2014 at 7:00 AM
I started this by writing down everything I knew about Graded and everything it made me feel. Then I made a found poem of it, and included a little "cut out and paste" in the middle. The image at the top is straight from the Graded website. So... I'll have to make this blog private after y'all read it.
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Abstract

At first, this project was about grades in general. As I started doing it, though, it became a research project-meets-memoir. I wanted to know the moment when grades started to feel wrong to me, when I registered the grading system as a disservice to my curiosity, and when I realized I had to be in the education system in order to change it.

I could have written more pieces, as a lot of memories and realizations surfaced, but I chose to keep it simple and with a few gaps. Grades left gaps in me, and my education often left me feeling like I couldn't voice my stories.

As one of my pieces tells, I was educated in a K-12 American School in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The school was called Graded, but as students we called it the "Bubble." It was an obscenely expensive school and housed the children of movie stars, presidents, and World Cup soccer players. Down the street from our palace of a campus was one of Sao Paulo's biggest slums, and as we drove home in our bulletproof cars, we were approached by starving children begging for money or, at times, angry teenagers with guns.

I never felt comfortable at Graded, and as I write this somewhat manifesto against the grading system, I realize it's rooted in my experiences there. I know other people have had different experiences, I know there are teachers who can make grades work to their students' benefit, and I know the kind of schools that would actually do away with grades would end up costing just as much as Graded.

I don't think that makes my story or my feelings any less real. I was a bright student with a lot of potential, and I was damaged by the grading system. As a teacher who believes education's primary responsibility is to instill curiosity, I feel I must share what I know, investigate what I feel, and question what we accept as just an aspect of teaching.

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As for how this is organized, it is designed as a blog since that's how I felt I could reach the most people should this become a manifesto one day. The posts are not in chronological order but rather in order of how they fit together in my mind.

Below each post is a comment I made explaining it. Click on comment to see the explanation. I recommend reading the entire blog first and then going back to read the comments.

Your comments are welcome here too. Please question and wonder. Share and come back.