Reflection: Refocusing Efforts

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor?
Teacher bird:
As a teacher, I find it would be difficult to assess the students without having a concrete percentage to give them. That being said, it would be much easier to teach the students knowing there is no added pressure of a letter grade or percentage to categorize them.
The grade indicates to the teacher how capable the student is at comprehending the information given to them. This is not always the case since some students can be capable of comprehending but could have just had a bad day and not performed their best. Teachers can unconsciously end up thinking poorly of a student based on their grades, or favour students based on their grades. Being the instructor assigning the grades, there is some pressure since you have that relationship with your students and seeing them try so hard, you want to give them the marks for trying but you know you have to stay neutral to the entire class.

Student bird:
My student bird tells me there would be much less pressure on the students in their learning if there were no grades and percentages. They would be able to contribute and participate in class activities without thinking about whether it is graded or not. However, it would be difficult to assess how they are doing in a course if they do not have a particular percentage given to them. My personal opinions could be due to my own experiences as a student.
To a student, a grade indicates how well they are doing in the course and how well they have to improve. Some students compare with others in order to gain more confidence or more willpower to do better. These grades are based on whether these students can perform well under pressure or not, and at most times students end up caring more about the marks than about the material being taught. Students can gain confidence from good grades, but can also feel down and withdrawn after noticing bad grades. They can also feel embarrassed and hurt by their teacher if not given the grade they feel they worked hard for.

2) What are some of the unintended side effects of grading? How do grades and marks in themselves format the social relations and learning situations in a classroom, a school, a district?
Grading can lead hierarchy to form in the classroom: the smarter students form competitions to see who will succeed the most on assessments, the struggling students either withdraw and refrain from participating in activities, or stick together and poke fun at the institution of teaching all together. Teachers unconsciously associate the lower grades with negligence and think all students with lower grades are all badly behaved.

3) Could you imagine teaching math and/or physics without giving grades? How could a teacher encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading?
It would be hard to imagine teaching without grades since I went through the public school system being given grades myself; it is hard to imagine anything different. However, just because it is hard to imagine does not mean it is impossible. A teacher could always create more application to real world which would allow students to understand the reason why math is very much correlated to their everyday lives. This could give students the motivation to want to learn on their own, without the validation of percentages and letter grades.