I still remember how life was before quarantine, being carefree and indifferent to the big problems of the world; living life through the highs of today rather than the worries of tomorrow. And many people say that quarantine made kids grow up too fast, showing them that the world isn’t a perfect place, rather a collection of imperfect ideas that when looked at from the right angle gives the illusion of tranquility. An illusion that was broken in seconds. When people say this, they usually mean it negatively, as if to say being older is being thrust into a world with problems, without the solutions. And I completely agree with this, but is it such a bad thing? As people, we naturally feel lost when there’s nothing we’re working towards, like a big promotion, a group project, or a nonprofit cause. But children haven’t developed this sense of self-awareness. Naturally, as we get older, this universal fact becomes clearer and even self-evident. I feel lucky that I got a taste for this dur...
In high school, “success” is often based on very objective measures of success, like standardized tests, captaining a sports team, etc. But this isn’t true for everything, and the class that made me realize this was Dance 1. Aptitude in dance is well-defined in some loose sense, in fact my school has competitive dance teams that run merit-based, but the class offered by the school has to be different. Because of the nature of the subject, everyone comes into the class with varying levels of skill. Trying to find objective measures of skill doesn’t work anymore; it’s nearly impossible to compare a complete beginner to someone that has been dancing for 10+ years. The solution: grading effort. From a learning point of view, evaluating based on effort makes sense and it's almost the same as grading someone on how much they have grown in the subject matter. This is one of the ideas behind gradeless classrooms, the idea being it is more fair to grade someone based on the performance impr...
