The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach - Part 1

In this post, I introduce two foes of mastery learning: The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach.

The Flaky Flowerchild is the ostensibly compassionate teacher who creates "loopholes" for kids, who tries "humanize" the rigid strictures of the institution, in part, through her grading. If pressed to create learning objectives for her classes, a lot of them would begin "The student will develop an appreciation for..." or "The student will think deeply about..." In other words, her entire curriculum is utterly unmeasurable, and, when it comes time to measure (i.e. the end of the term), she is usually willing to "have an open mind" about what a student has or has not accomplished in the class. The problem with the Flaky Flowerchild is that we have no idea what goes on in the bright, peace-loving confines of her classroom. Countless students emerge from her courses vaguely affirmed in their personhood but woefully unprepared in the subject areas she teaches. Her "compassion" is actually a form of injustice.

The Curmudgeonly Coach, on the other hand, doesn't budge for anyone. Come grades time, you'll hear him saying things like "A 59.4% is a 'E' and that's what he's gonna get!" and "For some of these kids, failure's the best thing that'll ever happen to 'em." He holds the line with an almost Kantian sense of rigor, as if the future of civilization depended on his unrelenting dedication to principle. The problem with the Curmudgeonly Coach, however, is that he is unrelentingly dedicated to the wrong things. His relentless dedication does not concern mastery, but rather the "hoops" of school--character, employability skills, attendance, and fastidiously filling out the little squares in his gradebook. He is also devoted to the blind "justice" of the 100-point scale and the mean (see a later post dealing with this topic). Alternative assessments are not even on this guy's radar. Students incapable of jumping through his hoops, eventually burn out or drop out. Good riddance. Unlike the Flaky Flowerchild, we have some idea what his "good" students can do, but we know little about the students he failed.