I Can't lyrics

A math student just brought her college test to me sharing how relieved she was that she got a 70 on her recent test. Her focus was on just surviving the ordeal with a passing grade because she did not feel she was capable of passing. I asked her if she knew what errors she made so we could try to bolster those areas for future use of those skills. She blinked a few times at me as if I had spoken some lost dialect of a forgotten tribe. "I got these problems wrong." We sat together to review each of those problems and she was able to catch every error she was making. It was easy to do because she simply made 2, yes just TWO errors on the 4 page exam. One error was distribution with a negative number and the other error was related when simplifying something like (4n - 8) / 2. These two errors are technically two sides of the same coin, but lets let that go for this discussion. 

After our review I asked her how she felt she did. Her response was focused now on all that she did right and how one silly error (repeated in 8 problems out of 30) tripped her up. With each problem, I broke down the math skills needed to be able to complete the problem. Typically there were 9 steps and out of all of those 9 steps she knew conceptually 100% of all of the test. Procedurally she simply had one error. I don't know how you want to assign some made up numbers for assessing this, but please think about this student received a grade of 73 on a 4 page test in which she made one procedural error 8 times. If teachers were evaluated in such a manner there would be mass exportation in our professions or at least serious depression medication sales increases. 

Leecy, I hear those cant's every day and I often tackle those to find out what errors or challenges were actually in place. When those items are identified and placed in context of all of the other steps or parts that were present and done well, attitudes start to shift. I often hear, "Yea, that's nice but your the only one that looks at this that way. Everyone else just sees the F and I am a looser." The psychological damage of grading practices is quite severe and way more common than one would hope. Shifting a focus from "How many problems did not have the response in the answer key" to "Which errors were made and share that in the scope of all that was required in the problem" can fix most of those "I Can't" perspectives. 

Another element that breeds the "I can't" is the propensity of the "one and done" assessment strategies that are often in place. In any life skill we all fail a number of times before we "get it". This applies to physical skills like tying our shoes or mental skills like memorizing our phone number. The difference is that in real life, you always can reflect on the failure, adapt and try again. Even if it was a critical job interview, you can still try again. There is always the next great job or the next perfect date one can find success from a massive failure. In stark contrast, if you fail in school, thats it, you fail. We do not encourage the reflect, restrategize, and try again cycle of learning. Our systems are set up to Learn, Practice, Prepare and Assess and hope that one run through is sufficient. With grade scaling and increasingly low expectations of performance, many do get out of our education systems with satisfactory grades but a significant deficiency in skills or knowledge. Colleges lament this all the time as the number of failing freshmen seems to increase annually. Our systems need to include recursive failure/adaption/learning cycles and remove the one shot critical numeric label. All of this continues to reinforce the "I can't" mentalities. 

After working to break down the psychological damage for most of a semester with new students, I NEVER hear the "I can't" statements. I hear, "I am ok up to here, but right at this point I struggle with ..." The concentration must shift from what the learning challenge is instead of "how do I label  you as a learner when compared to others". We have such an unhealthy fetish over what number we achieved rather than what skills or procedures I understood and which I did not. Our current grading practices result in winners and losers and with such a comparisons there is often just a few winners and the rest of us are losers. I passionately believe poor grading practice and a system that obsesses over subjective numbers is the primary source of the lack of confidence in our learners today!