Ah yes. The important lessons of school:

A high school senior says he earned an A+, not an A, and has sued to get the grade changed to bolster his chance at becoming valedictorian.

Brian Delekta, who finished 11th grade in 2002 ranked at the top of his class, says he should have received an A+ for a St. Clair County intermediate school district work-experience class in which he worked as a paralegal in his mother’s law office.

Let’s see: grades are important for what they get you, not as a reflection of what you’ve learned. And you should sue to get what you want. (His mom’s a lawyer—probably not a help.)

(From the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Jon Carroll’s column today talks about why we might do better just staying home with our kids and teaching them what we know, instead of shipping them off to other places to learn:

And I’m thinking: Maybe it would be better if we just stayed home and taught them what we know. Not all of us are famous mandolin players, of course, but all of us are something. We garden, we cook, we sing, we collect clocks. Nothing the matter with teaching a kid to collect clocks.

The bonus is obvious. We get to spend time with our kids; they get to spend time with us. They’ll want to spend time with their friends too, and they should, but there are lots of hours in the day if you look for them. And you’ll begin to build a relationship based on something other than the natural power differential in families.

Not that I did this when my kids were young. I was having an important career. It worked out OK in the end, but I ain’t gettin’ those hours back, and I think about that sometimes, even now.

According to a story in today’s LA Times (sadly, registration required):

Today’s college freshmen got more A’s than ever in high school while studying a record low number of hours in their senior year, according to a national survey by UCLA. But they may not be any smarter than those of past generations.

Instead, frenzied competition for college admission has inflated grades and trained students to become experts at winning A’s, say the survey’s director and college students and officials in Southern California.

“Students are more savvy about what it takes to get an A,” said Linda J. Saxon, the UCLA education professor who directed this year’s American Freshman Survey, which has been tracking students’ opinions and habits for 37 years.

In the classes she teaches, students now “focus more of their energies studying what it takes to get a grade.” They might be able to study less if they focus on that as the outcome, rather than on learning, which would take more time, she said.

Well, is anyone surprised? Christ, everything is so high stakes today, of course you need an A in everything you do. Competition for grades is killing any desire on the part of children to learn, as has been so well described by Alfie Kohn in Punished By Rewards, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with incentives like grades, Kohn will explain it for you.

One change Kohn recommends to our system of grading is changing to a system where you get an A or an incomplete. You’ve either done the work, or you haven’t.

Of course, a great many people would howl bloody murder if their kid can’t have a much better GPA than the next kid. The current grading system enforces the notion that some children must be left behind. As the article in the Times goes on to say:

At one prestigious Los Angeles prep school, which he asked not to be identified, Poch said he had found every student in an English class earned either an A or an A-minus.

Well, you know, maybe everyone in the class did the work to get an A, you know? Should we have a system where some kids are forced to fail?