Today I attended the annual teacher's convention, where all the teachers in Regina convene at a location to hear some speakers, where the parking is ridiculous and all the young teachers are playing Candy Crush during the sessions and whispering.

Alfie Kohn presented. He is a radical speaker who preaches against giving numbered (or lettered) grades, curriculum-mandated outcomes, and backward design (ultimately planning your entire year around the outcomes, which is exactly what I was taught to do in University).

During his presentation, there were many spurts of clapping regarding standardized testing and teaching to the test and creating robots and that type of thing. In fact, he got a lot of support throughout the entire presentation, even when it came to him bashing our curriculum. I had never heard someone equate the Saskatchewan curriculum to standardized tests before.

I sat beside a friend of mine who is currently teaching at the same conservative school I am teaching at. While, at my old school, I would have sat by some people who would have been shouting "Yes!" and "Preach it, brother!" to these notions of classrooms where students are learning how to THINK rather than learning specific content at specific age levels, I found myself amongst people who thought some of the ideas were pretty good, but for the most part, it's impossible, it isn't realistic, etc.

I attended a secondary "breakout session" where Kohn was answering questions from a smaller group of people, about things like failing, getting into university, and what teaching like this would look like day to day. In this context, I was sitting alone, with the freedom to pull out a notebook and jot some notes down.

I wrote down some things he said, like: "Don't give the answers," "Coverage is the enemy of understanding," and "Grading should be an afterthought." I found myself daydreaming of these idyllic schools where kids, not of the same age groups necessarily, would gather in comfortable spaces and have co-teaching from teachers with masters degrees. There would be morning meetings where students could talk about both personal and academic concerns. There would be a real sense of community. It would truly be student centered, in that, in English class, students could decide what theme they might want to address, what novel they might want to read, where things like sentence structures might come up with genuine curiosity (what does make a complete sentence, and why does it matter?).

It made me think of a video I watched of this school in Britain, I believe, that was on this beautiful, secluded campus, where students would only learn when they wanted to. This resulted in some children for weeks or even months avoiding learning altogether, because they could. But after a time, they got bored, and began to actively seek out learning.

In the change room after a game of recreational soccer, I talked a bit about these things to my fellow teammates. While I received some positive feedback, for the most part, as I encountered with my colleagues, people were skeptical and even disgusted at the notion.

No grades?

It is hard to get my head around it, and I, too, wonder about motivations and work ethic.

But there is just something so awful about the way, especially in content driven courses, a person must cover topics by such-and-such a date, with such-and-such depth, to such-and-such a percentage. I have heard my students want to stop and muddle in a topic, and yet I am taught to furrow at the calendar and, well, maybe allow a rabbit-trail today, but tomorrow, yes, we'll get back on track.

There is something unsettling about this type of learning and these types of students we have trained so well.