-A != A-

One thing I've noticed about English teachers is that they usually hate math. They hated it when they took it in school, and have never used it since. Which is fine, I guess, if you're teaching English, but when they start to calculate students' grades it becomes evident. I think they should teach a class Math for Grading 101. I would volunteer to teach, actually.

A few days ago in English we had to write 'seven carat diamond paragraphs', which is a paragraph where you have a simple sentence, then a compound, then complex, then compound complex, then complex, then compound, then simple. We were writing these paragraphs about a story in the book, but I was mostly focused on the grammar and not what I was writing.

When she handed the paragraphs back today, I noted with surprise I had gotten a 54. Looking over the paper, I realized she had deducted 2 points for every past tense verb I used (since we are not supposed to write about books in the past tense). I had put the entire thing in the past tense. I conferred with my friend—my friend had written more verbs, and put all of them in the past tense, so she had received a 34. This made no sense, and was really a lottery of how many verbs you had written. If one was doing it sensibly, it would be a certain amount of points for speaking in all past tense, and half those points for using past tense half the time, etc.

Now this was just the beginning of the strange grading—she had made her grading system such that one could receive negative points on the assignment! I was so tempted to hand in the rewrite written in a fashion that would earn me a negative value, and thus pointing out the ridiculousness of the grading system. She had graded them by first saying how many of the seven sentences you had done grammatically correct—I had 6/7, giving me an 86, then taken whatever other points you lose off that number, so she took 32 points off for my 16 past tense verbs. If I had just made all of the sentences wrong, I could have gotten
-32 points!

I wonder what letter grade you get when you get negative points. Perhaps grades work on a modular scale—if you go below an F you get an A, but undershoot too much and you get a B. Or if you get over a hundred you get an F. That would be amusing. (Also, if you get the title reference, kudos to you.)


Sachi