Grades and Learning

GRADES AND LEARNING

This is not an easy time to be a student. The stress of COVID-19 and the racial & gender injustices in our country impacts all our lives. This makes it difficult to learn, manage our time, and juggle our many responsibilities. My number one goal is to support your learning. Please message me with questions about assignments, concerns about completing activities, and let me know how I can help. I am ready to meet on Zoom or through a private email message. Sometimes it just takes a quick message to clear up confusion. I am here for you!

jgonzalez001@sdccd.edu

The goal of all of my courses is to engage with primary sources, develop critical thinking skills, and to understand historical trends. I value your process and progress in improving these critical skills. I want you to be able to focus less on your grades and points, and more on your learning and improvement overall.

In my experience, when grades are removed, students tend to focus more on the learning rather than the collection of points that grades/averages encourage (this is the “game” of school with which we are all familiar). Learning is a product of trying, being assessed, receiving feedback, and then trying once again. Instead, grades/points tend to signal to the student that the learning opportunity has ended. The approach I'm using is often called #ungrading.

I’ll be focusing on your potential rather than on your deficiencies. I will not place a single letter grade on any of your work. Instead, I will offer meaningful, engaging, and progressive feedback that will encourage you to view your learning as a PROCESS that involves multiple attempts that may produce success and even failure (but with no fear of punishment).

Fail a few times and get back on your feet. We, myself included, all learn from our mistakes. I was not this super cool professor from the start, lol. I am sure you have read my comments on Rate My Professor, so have I. I would prefer you emailing me about any grievances but I get it, we live in the digital rating age. Anyway, this class is designed to help you succeed and I want you to succeed.

Instead, you will receive a mark of ✨Success; 🟡 Almost There; ❌ Please Submit.

Now, our District and Miramar (& Cuyamaca) College still require that a “traditional” grade be given at the end of the semester based on Accreditation Standards. So, I will two grade proposal learning activities. One during the mid-semester and the other a week before the end of the semester.

Reflective questions will be provided that will look at the work produced, and you will advocate on the letter grade appropriate for the class based on the work completed. I reserve the right to give final say regarding the final course letter grade based on the labor or work produced.

In case you are curious on why I am doing UnGrading, here is an article written that provides some of the reasons for why I am doing this. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Confused? Don’t be, schedule an appointment with me. The zoom link for Student Visiting Hours can be found in Canvas, which is our designated Learning Management System for our class.

And, this leads to the newest app that is getting a lot of attention, CHATgpt. If, you are unfamiliar, this is an app that can literally write papers for you. Some of my colleagues are freaking out about it. Not me. A lot of our writing will be self reflective and annotations of primary sources. There will be some questions that can be asked on CHATgpt and if you know how to use the app, then please cite it. I feel it is no different that using Wikipedia. We all use Wikipedia. A lot of instructors do not like it but if you are going to use Wikipedia, then, cite it. There might be times during the semester that I will put in one of our questions to see how the AI writes it and we can then compare it to our own writing. Here's a quick 5 minute listen from NPR from a college professor who share some similar thoughts as me regarding the AI app: NPR: 'Everybody is cheating' Why this teacher has adopted an open ChatGPT policy.