Gifted Slacker

I hate school. I love education.

In the 3rd part of Joel’s talk at Yale he describes the way I wish school worked: no true grades, heavy work load. Some will argue that if there aren’t grades, students won’t do the work. Which is true, and you can fail those people. However, the ones who apply themselves, the ones motivated by education as an end in itself, will excel.

The best thing about Algorithmic Thinking was that you had to write a lot. There were 13 papers—one every week. You didn’t get grades. Well, you did. Well, ok, there’s a story there. One of the reasons Schank hated undergrads so much was that they were obsessed with grades. He wanted to talk about whether computers could think and all undergrads wanted to talk about was why their paper got a B instead of an A. At the beginning of the term, he made a big speech about how grades are evil, and decided that the only grade you could get on a paper was a little check mark to signify that some grad student read it. Over time, he wanted to recognize the really good papers, so he added check-PLUS, and then there were some really lame papers, so he started giving out check-minuses, and I think I got a check-plus-plus once. But grades: never.

This way of instruction makes me push myself harder than I ever would for a “grade.” Give me interesting problems and give me a lot of them, or give me a paycheck.