P.S. You had my vote. Congratulations!

My other thought is that a few chopped up cherry tomatoes on top might help the prettiness. But it turned out all the cherry tomatoes we had were gone.

Actually, when thinking about this yesterday, I was hard on myself for being one of those students who goes through the motions, but after further consideration, I am sure I would still show up (and did) to classes that did not grade on attendance at all because it was the Right Thing To Do. And I am sure I learned all the material, but I’m harder on myself for not engaging with the material beyond what was necessary to write the paper. I have to be careful with this because the Boyfriend definitely values knowing the material over getting the best grades (why model 3 doesn’t always work). He’ll lose points for not proofreading because he was too busy reading supplementary material for example. But ever the pragmatic, I’m the one worrying about the proper citation format.

I think your having good classes and professors makes a huge difference as well. I’m not going to put effort into a class when I feel like the professor is not also putting effort into it. If a professor talks at me for three hours, drops assignments randomly, and is uninformed, I’m going to do little more than is necessary. This is part of the reason I was frustrated by library school; this is where I’m supposed to care the most, but not having that consistent/inspiring/logical professor turned me off of the material. I would also say that coming from being graded on the quality of your writing in an English major, to a program that did not care so much was a difficult adjustment. I spent a lot of time feeling like I didn’t deserve the A I got because I knew I could have done better.

The final reason I cared about grades was that for me, grades = money. Close to half my tuition was paid for solely through merit-based aid. If you get respectable but average grades, I could see them being a lot more easily dismissed. But my As turned out to be worth close to $50k.

I may have wandered a bit from your original post, but it’s something I think about a lot despite having graduated. I agree with you that graded attendance isn’t going make a student care, but I can also see it from the professor’s pov, as a way to get students to show up, since not everyone has homeschooler mentality. Not that I know anything about Wooster, but I would guess that there were a higher percentage of people who valued their education enough to show up a little more than at DU.

The first thing to understand about the educational system in the US (and most other places) is that the system doesn’t give a crap whether or not people learn the material. There are certainly individuals who care, and there are students who care, but fundamentally schools are not optimized for learning.

They’re optimized for sorting.

Structurally, our educational system is designed to separate management from line-workers. We don’t care if students learn, say, US History. We care how much (and how well) they can learn US History in a fixed amount of time compared to their peers. The end-product — the grades — are less a reflection of how well students have mastered the material than they are a simple ranking of how smart (for one narrow but very, very useful definition of “smart”) the students are compared to each other.

Once upon a time, we used those rankings to steer students down different educational and vocational paths. Some went to college. Some to the factory.

I think it’s important to not dismiss the utility of the system when viewed in its temporal and cultural context. It was shitty for a lot of the students, but useful to the country.

Times, of course, have changed. Charlie Reigeluth (https://profile.educ.indiana.edu/reigelut) has done half a lifetime of work exploring some of these issues (as policy and as educational challenges), and talks eloquently (and, occasionally, at length about the need to move toward a mode of schooling that is more appropriate for the modern age.

Essentially, what we do currently is fix time-on-task and allow learning to fluctuate. There’s a 15-week semester, and students learn whatever they can in that time. If we were serious about learning, we’d hold mastery of the material constant (e.g., you have to learn it) and provide each student with as much or as little time as she needs to master it.

In the US we take this approach with only one thing: reading. Students of all ability levels are taught and tutored and cajoled and worked with until they can read. If we’re serious about learning, we need to demand learning, no matter how long or how many resources it takes.