Beyond the Grade

Beyond the Grade

1. We read the syllabus together. A syllabus is a pact. Our convivial commitment: to learn together. The work will be intense and challenging. Doing it will be the meter of its own value. Propositions will be shared. They will involve close reading and creative practice. All will freely receive an A.

2. The “free” grade is a refusal to reduce the work to the form of credit teaching underwrites. Accreditation is pedagogy’s commitment to withholding, from those who learn outside the parameters of a curriculum, the value-added of advancement.

3. Evaluation grids rarely offer the choice to withhold this customary mark of succesful learning. In this case the grade is given to be forgotten. It is given in advance to all, in the recognition that for some it will truly come “freely.” They may never show up, never “do the work.”

4. We accept, collectively, not to assume to know the shape the work takes. Most will exceed the parameters proposed. All will be free to learn in their own ways, on their own time. The work will push us to the limit of thought, and we will go there together.

5. I ask them to look around, to nod at each other, to take into their field of learning the opening up of the model of scarcity. I ask them to let go of the upgrade of the exceptional which can only degrade thought. I ask them to look for exception otherwise. “We owe each other everything” (Moten and Harney 2013).

6. A normative pedagogic model teaches that we must be evaluated to be graded, that to be graded we must “fit” the evaluative model. Value is an add-on to the pedagogical experiment. We come together in order to mete that value.

7. What we learn, over years of classroom education, is to parse the work in advance to understand how to fit within its schema of value. Before we are actually learning, we are planning how to meet the standard.

8. Value is given to what is legible. The strong belief that some things need to be learned before others keeps us in our place, the undergraduate often stuck in large general-topic classes, the graduate student in seminars where students individually perform their knowledge. At each stage, much effort is put into articulating the criteria. If the student learns it well, if they master the prerequisite, they can package the learning into a A.

9. This is how neurotypicality is taught, and valued.

10. True learning, beyond evaluation, activates an environment of what Brian Massumi calls the surplus value of life (2019). The surplus value of life cannot be quantified. It is what happens when we feel into a collective environment, and agree to share in the process of its unfolding. It is what happens when we sit with a sentence or two, mulling them over together, unsure of where to go next. It is what happens when that sentence, later, takes on a walk, infusing our evening with the tinge of excitement that comes with apprehension and comprehension, overlaid.

11. The “A” that is given in that nod is not where value resides. Yet there is always trepidation. Is it really possible to give value so freely?

12. The unease in the room amongst some is palpable. There is a sense that exceptionalism has been stolen. Yet nothing has been taken away. What has been given is the commitment to learn, on its own terms. It takes time to accept this, to really feel into it, since the economy of scarcity does make a difference in a university system, as does its upgraded exceptionalism.

13. Before anything else, what we have been taught is the value of scarcity we call exceptionalism. We assume it defines intelligence.

14. This is what it looks like: retaining information in a way that relays back to the professor in dependable and consistent ways; knowing what information to hold onto; giving gestural feedback (through the frontal gaze) that lets the professor know you are attending to them; meeting the requirements in a way that speaks directly to how the professor coordinated the course content.

15. The nod is rife with anxiety. The system of pedagogy, from earliest classroom experience, has taught us that some of us have more to offer. Some of us, we think with some concern, truly are exceptional. We are certain we are being cheated.

16. Exceptionality is born of normopathy. Exception that falls out of the grid of propriety is conceived as a problem. Those ways of knowing are considered tangential. They are a threat to the well-oiled pedagogical environment.

17. A well-functioning learning environment, upgraded by exceptionality, requires that exception meet the confines of what has already been defined as having value. The exceptional student is exceptional at recognizing the shape of what counts. Those who fall out of this upgraded exceptionality can only be degraded.

18. The shape of what counts is a posture as much as it is a grafting onto experience of what will be recognized to matter. The posture is practiced: eyes forward, head up. A certain minimal form is required for this to register in the room, and with the professor. A seasoned professor will recognize this student right away. The student will confirm to the professor that their teachings are reaching them. This will reassure the professor. Exceptionality, in the grading system, will be difficult to extricate from this reassurance.

19. In the graded classroom, the commitment to the scarcity of the exceptional will affect each interaction. The participation will carry the concern of that exceptionality. The attention will be on exceptionality.

20. A certain number of students will disengage. They know they have never been exceptional.

21. Sometimes you can pull them into the mix, and they will trust that something else can happen. Sometimes you have to wait until after the term is over. It takes time to break the habit of assuming degradation.

22. What the graded classroom will have registered, beyond any teachings, will be how to meet the shape of exceptionalism. Those in the know will have learned, again, how to be proper students.

23. Normopathy is always racializing. Presuppositions of value require the stable center. Any and all sidling to exceptionalism carry the promise of whiteness, which is to say, neurotypical self-centering. This is not to say that non-white folks become white in their exceptionalism. It is to say that exceptionalism always carries the whiff of whiteness.

24. Whiteness is the assumed center of existence. It is not actually the center — it is always less person than posture. Persons certainly fit into its posture, but not all of them get away with it. The exceptional in the (de)gradation of the not-white is always the exception. It never becomes the center: the center exists precisely because of this ongoing exclusion.

25. To name neurotypicality as whiteness allows for the recognition of the practice of whiteness over the skin colour of it. The skin colour is not incidental: it does make a difference. But to act white is to have assumed the exceptionalism of the center. Only those in the range of what whiteness will recognize as it-self can truly sit in this exceptionalism. The rest will be exceptions to the rule.

26. Back to the nod. As we look around the room, exceptionalism shudders. Those who have most sidled it worry. How will they stand out in a context where the standing out has lost its value?

27. But they are missing the point. The standing out was never a standing out. It was a standing in.

28. It is the movement of thought that activates a standing out. It moves a body into the limits of the thinkable, into the world.

29. As body-world separation tenuously untethers, the world begins to leak in. 29. The learning never happens quite where we expect it to.

30. The assumption that the student who is not giving in is not learning, that their absence from the classroom signifies a lack of interest in learning, that what is perceived as their inattention suggests an unwillingness to grasp the scope of it, is false. Or at least, it falsely situates pedagogy, and its movement of thought.

31. A pedagogy of care is a concern for the event of learning. Teaching sits in the field of its unpresupposing sociality. To teach into concern is to care for the conviviality of thought, and to trust its meandering nature. If body is world, it is to care for how the world enters into the classroom, and how the learning occurs beyond it.

32. The nod carries a duplicity: most students deeply desire other ways of learning, and they welcome the shift. But they are also concerned that this will make unsettling a demands. Some will feel deep relief. They always been learning, but their learning has often not registered. They will note, with some trepidation, that perhaps this site of learning can cater to their neurodiverse ways. They will give themselves fully to it, and thrive. For those who have basked in exceptionality, having figured out how to manage the A+ on the regular, there will be some anguish. They don’t know the rules of this game. They will ask a lot of questions about the marking scheme.

33. It will be dispiriting to have to attend to all the fear about marking, since there is no marking. But this will have to happen in order for the field to thrive in its concern for the emergent pedagogy it will generate and tend. The professor will continuously be put in her place. She will want to resist this — after all she is also there to learn — but she will recognize she holds this power-to-value, so she will reassure. This type of care is less interesting: it reassures the norm. It will be important to start here but not dwell here. A pedagogy of concern must emphasize the field of pedagogy itself, not its fear of falling out of exceptionalism.

34. Colleagues will worry about the lack of evaluation. They will whisper that “anything goes” in this affront to proper grading. There is a strong presupposition, in the classroom context, that without the imposition of scarce resources (for meting value) learning will not happen.

35. Students will study. They will bring their friends. They will organize reading groups. Sometimes, they will even decide to continue the course without you, once the term is over.

36. The work will be thick, textured, complex.

37. Sometimes it will be hard to know whether learning has truly occured (there may be lack of attendance, or no “return” on the investment). The teacher may fantasize about punishing this student who has not aptly demonstrated their interest in what the professor has to offer. It will be important to stick to the proposition: do not assume that you know the bounds of the classroom, or what it teaches.

38. Students will return, in years following, to ask how you knew they were learning. You will have to tell them honestly that you didn’t know. But you also didn’t know, for sure, that they weren’t learning. The pedagogy of concern, you now realize, extends to this not-knowing, to the belief that the world is the ultimate teacher, and that you are there in its service.

39. Curious, you will ask them what they learned.

40. Some will tell you they suffered a terrible loss, or went to rehab, or finally managed to rest.

41. All will tell you it was a relief not to be graded.

42. Often, these students will return to your classes long after they need the credit. Together you will have learned that you don’t do this work for credit.

we owe each other everything