We, the Messenger Editorial Board, present to you, the student body, a short synopsis of standards based grading in the classroom:

PART I: THE HOMEWORK

In this early stage of the process, a teacher has finished covering material and has assigned homework. We take it home, consider doing it. Then things pile up. Our lives are so stressful. Homework isn’t for a grade, so why are we wasting our time on it? We just jot some things down on paper to avoid academic detention. For those of us in classes where academic detention is not enforced, we quite simply don’t do the work.

PART II: THE TEST

It’s been a few weeks since the unit started. Time for a test. Which means studying. Which means reading. Which means opening a book, doing some practice. TOO MUCH. Again, our lives are too stressful, and school has no place interfering. Herein lies another standards based grading loophole: retakes. It doesn’t matter now, so we can just fail a test and retake it. No problem.

PART III: THE RETAKE

It took some schedule wiggling, but we worked out a time to come and retake a test. Yes, this time it actually mattered, so we did some studying- enough for a low A. It’s technically a little late, but we’ve finally taken the time to get a [somewhat] firm understanding of the content. It’s all good, we’re done.

But the teachers aren’t.

Let’s be honest, MHS. A lot of us are playing the standards based grading system, and it’s not fair. It doesn’t really seem like we care about the fact that teachers are all of the sudden having to make up alternative assessments for every single quiz, test and “summative assessment” out there. The homework they’ve put together, intended to help us learn, is not even given the time of day.

It’s one thing to not care about school. It’s another to slack, and then put it on the shoulders of our teachers to give us a second chance. It’s time to get real and take a little bit of responsibility for our own education. Or not. That’s cool too.