As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes, but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to Python aimed at high school students that I’m teaching weekly. I thought that this would be good fodder for the State of Security. So, whenever I have something interesting to discuss, expect to find it here.

Grades suck. I think this is something that people can universally agree on. Nobody likes them and they serve us in a very limited way. I know I previously said limited information sharing that includes ‘Satisfactory’ or ‘Unsatisfactory’ messaging was useless, and I do believe that, but I also believe that grades are relatively useless. I have always had a love/hate relationship with grades, but as I’m marking my students’ final projects, I’m realizing how much I really dislike grades or, in reality, I hate the power that grading systems hold over us.

The Beginning of the End

Grades and I parted ways in high school. Until that point, I thought they were the greatest thing. They reflected how well I was doing. It was in high school that I realized just how arbitrary grading was and how it could reflect how well I was doing, but it didn’t. My realization occurred in OAC, the 5th year of high school (previously called Grade 13), that we used to have here in Ontario, Canada. My OAC English teacher docked me marks on a written paper because I refused to write ‘he/she’ and instead wrote ‘they’. I argued, (Read more...)