How to give grades when you know that giving grades is wrong

SpeEdChange.at.medium

“My school requires that I give grades.” We all hear this a lot, because it is usually true. “We are required to use a certain method of determining grades,” is perhaps less common but still true for many.

But what happens when you know that ‘traditional’ grading is wrong?

When we interviewed prospective librarians in my last job we’d ask, “What would you not do, even if ordered to?” then, “What would you still do even if ordered to stop?”

We were looking for the professional and moral redlines we would hope anyone who works with children would have. After all, in the United States, at least before the age of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, we even expected soldiers to refuse to carry out immoral orders. At the post-Civil War Andersonville trial, and again at Nuremberg after the Second World War, and again at the My Lai trials during the Vietnam conflict, the US made it clear that the “dictates of one’s conscience” had to take precedence over military orders. It is not just people in the military, just last year three Florida police officers were sent to prison for following orders — and believe me, that’s not an isolated situation.