Securing the Blessings of Liberty

It customary on Independence Day to honor the service and sacrifice of our military veterans, who, we are solemnly reminded, have "secured the blessings of liberty" for the rest of us and our posterity since the first continental army. While it is true that members of our military have historically paid the highest price in the cause of liberty, it would be unjust and untrue to give them all the credit--or all the responsibility. 

After all, threats to our liberty do not only (perhaps not even primarily) come from external forces. So on this Independence Day, I want to suggest that, in addition to honoring our veterans' many sacrifices to make and keep our nation free, we also remember the service and very real sacrifices of many others who also dedicate their lives to securing for all of us the blessings of liberty, including:

• Civil Rights leaders who have fought and sometimes died to ensure that women and people of color could enjoy the blessings of full citizenship, and who still fight and sometimes risk their lives to secure the blessings of liberty to Americans who remain to any degree unjustly disenfranchised
• First responders who put their lives on the line to keep us safe enough to enjoy our liberty
• Overworked lower court judges and public defenders who work thanklessly day in and day out to try to keep our justice system functioning, and those who attend seriously to their duties as jurors
• Civil servants--including politicians (not all, but many), regulators, etc., all the way down to the lowly poll workers on voting days making sure that we can participate in the democratic process--who dedicate their time and talents to promoting the common welfare rather than simply their own selfish interests
• Teachers of history, philosophy, ethics, civics, the arts, and sciences who remind us what liberty has meant and can mean, and what it has and may cost us to get, keep, and extend
• Those who stand up to government authority and say "no" when the government is in the wrong, even when they are in the minority
• Those who stand up FOR government authority against the mob when the government is in the right
• Countless and nameless women, LGBTQIA people, and people of color who for most of our country's history were effectively or explicitly denied opportunities to serve in the military, in office, as civil servants, or in most professions; and who yet retained faith, though long deferred, in the promise of liberty and served however they could within the limited spheres they were allowed. 

Though we rightly honor members of our armed services, we must not forget that not all patriots wear a uniform. Even George Washington, perhaps our nation's greatest military hero, understood that slavish veneration of a nation's military would ultimately doom it. Those who serve honorably in the military deserve our care and respect, but they are the arms, not the heart and soul of a free nation. Though most of us will never serve in the armed forces, all of us have a right and a duty to "secure the blessings of liberty" to ourselves and our posterity.

Jesus Is Not Your Political Property

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic party can lay a greater claim to "Christian values," because Jesus Christ didn't come to Earth to establish a political kingdom[1], and he expressly called his disciples to reject political and other worldly divisions. We are to be one in Christ, not one in any man-made political ideology.

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties in the United States are strongly influenced by Christian ideologies because Christianity has historically been and remains a majority religion in the United States. Furthermore, many members of both parties are Christians, not merely in name but in practice.

The reason that Republican Christians and Democratic Christians disagree about which party is more compatible with Christian discipleship is because Christianity has a complicated, millennias-old history of interpreting its own doctrines and sacred texts. Neither party is the party of Jesus.

This does not mean that Christians should be apolitical. Although we are called to be not of the world, we are also called to live in the world and to be a force for moral good in our communities by word and by example. But it does mean that we must avoid taking our Lord's name in vain by claiming (or even allowing ourselves to privately believe) that Jesus is "on our side" or "against the other side" politically. We are called to be on His side, and not the other way around.

Image: "Black Marble: Americas." NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Flickr. CC BY 2.0.

[1] We understand that following His second coming, Jesus will establish a kingdom on Earth which will be both spiritual and political, but it's not that time yet, and it would be the height of arrogance to assume we know what that kingdom will look like or how its government will function. Our sacred texts give us only a few clues, and those clues don't look much like any human government that we have any record of.

A Love Letter to My Female Friends

When I was a very little girl, I reveled in pink everything, and in frilly dresses. By the time I reached adolescence, I disdained "girly" things and performative femininity because they felt too constricted.

During and after puberty, I struggled to love my increasingly feminine body. I liked myself, but the messages I heard from my local and national culture about female bodies and female minds left me feeling very ambivalent. I felt like I needed to prove that I wasn't one of those women (no woman is, really; but I didn't know that then). In many ways that attitude endured into adulthood.

But then something happened. I met a series of amazing women, some of whom revel in performative femininity, and others who don't. And I discovered feminism. Not the caricature of feminism that I was told about in disapproving tones as a child and young woman, but actual feminism, which is far more complex and inclusive than I had imagined.

I got plugged into more than one network of women who taught me by word and example that womanhood and femininity don't have to be constricting. Rather, womanhood and even performative femininity can be powerful and celebratory. They taught me to interrogate and resist those cultural messages that told me there was something (oh so many somethings) wrong with my femaleness. These women continually love and support and challenge me. They help me grow.

My life has followed a course I never could have expected and did not plan. I cannot imagine how I could have navigated that course and remained spiritually whole without my beloved women friends. I need them like I need oxygen and like I need chocolate.

(I love my guy friends too, and the amazing men in my family who love and support and challenge me. But they are more like icing on the cake! They are a wonderful bonus.)

As Leslie Knope says:

Why All Grades Are Subjective

It's been quite a long time since I posted a blog entry. My life has been very busy with a full-time job, a dissertation to write, and a household to maintain. Today I'm going to share a reply I sent to a student email about why all grades are subjective.

Image Source: Alexander Russo. "This Week in Education: Cartoons: 'Climb That Tree.'" Scholastic. Accessed 24 April 2019. Note: The attribution of the above quote to Albert Einstein is almost certainly false. See its entry on Quote Investigator for more information on its probable origin.

For context, Monday was the first day of BYU-Idaho's Spring semester. As usual, we went over the syllabus, and as I explained my somewhat heterodox grading policy (which I implemented in part to address the challenges of subjectivity and grade disputes), I declared that grades have nothing at all to do with learning, and that all grades, not just English grades, are subjective. At this point, I paused. I told them that one of my grad school professors, James Paul Gee, often says that "Academics is an evidence game," which means that when we make claims, we provide reasons and evidence to support our claims, and in so doing, we subject our judgment to scrutiny. However, there was insufficient time at that juncture for me to provide evidence to support my claim that all grades are subjective. I said if any of them would like me to do so, they could email me, and I would be happy to oblige. One student did (the first to take me up on my offer in three years, hurrah!). Below, I copy my reply:

Dear Student,

I'm so glad you asked!  

All grades are subjective because teachers (or administrators, or state and national standards boards) have to make choices about what to measure, how to measure it, how to weight each thing they are measuring, and so on. Let’s take math as an example.

Most people consider math to be the least subjective of all academic disciplines, because, at least at the level of arithmetic and simple algebra, it is clear whether a student got the answer correct or not—whether their final calculation “adds up.” However, math teachers still have to decide whether to grade solely on whether students calculated the correct result, or whether to include the student’s process of calculating their result. In other words, they have to consider whether students should get partial credit depending on how well their calculations demonstrate that they are grasping the concepts, even if they make errors along the way and ultimately may not get the correct result. If teachers decide to grade on both process and result, they have to decide how to weigh process vs. result in determining a score.

One problem with grading based only on getting the correct result is that any student with a calculator and an understanding of how to use it can get a correct result, even if they do not understand the underlying mathematical principles. If we only care about whether students can use calculators correctly, then why teach math at all? The reason is because we need people who understand mathematical principles in order to conceptualize and solve difficult quantitative problems that machines cannot do all by themselves—we need mathematicians who can think holistically and creatively. That requires that we measure process—but standardized tests, which measure outcome, do not measure process. In fact, if you ask a professional mathematician whether process matters less than, as much as, or more than outcome, I guarantee they will say that process matters as much as or more than outcome. Some ways of formulating a calculation are better, “more elegant” than others, even when they both get the same result. Thus process matters, and expert judgment, which is to some degree always subjective, is required to evaluate students’ answers to set problems. But as any builder or engineer can tell you, getting the right answer to a mathematical calculation matters a great deal! So we can't grade solely on process, either.

In creating exams, teachers have to decide not only what sorts of problems to set, and in what form (i.e. written out, multiple choice, etc.), but also how to weight different kinds of questions. They have to decide how to prioritize the importance of different mathematical concepts in determining how well students are demonstrating learning the core objectives of the class. They have to decide what those objectives are. They have to decide whether to “curve” their grades or not. Furthermore, even when a test and its scores are “standardized,” the teaching itself may not be. Different teachers will naturally emphasize different aspects of a standardized curriculum, and will be better at teaching some concepts than others. That will likely affect student outcomes on standardized tests—so then, how much are the tests measuring student outcomes vs. teacher performance? This is one (misguided) reason why some national school standards programs have tried to penalize teachers when their students underperform on standardized tests. But that, too, is problematic, because teachers control very, very little of what our students come into our classes with and take away from our classes.

So let’s consider some aspects of the student half of the equation. Going back to the question of results vs. process, some students start out “ahead” of others. The students at the top may make very few gains over the course of a semester—in other words, they did not learn much. In contrast, students closer to the bottom may make lots of progress. Yet if grades are based on outcome, the students who started out ahead and learned little would get an A, while the students who started near the bottom and learned much might still only manage a C. On the other hand, if we measure process, then the student who learned the most but still has a poorer grasp of the subject would get an A, and the student who learned little but has a better grasp of the subject would get a C. That also seems unfair, doesn’t it? Would it be fair to measure both process and outcome, and give both students a B? I don’t know—that’s why it’s subjective.

But wait, there’s more! Evidence demonstrates that students who get a good night’s sleep and eat a good breakfast before an exam will score much better than those who don’t. And students who experience greater stress in their environments tend to struggle more in school—it’s hard to stay focused on math when you’re worried about whether your older brother is going to get killed by someone just because they think he “looks suspicious,” or whether your unemployed dad will be drunk when you get home, or whether you mom will have managed to save enough money from being spent on alcohol to buy you and your siblings some fast food for dinner (because your electricity has been turned off and you have no way to cook meals at home). It’s hard to get enough sleep when you get woken up by the sounds of gunfire. It’s hard to stay focused when your stomach is gnawed with hunger because your parents can barely afford to provide one meal per day, and the hard classes you have to take are all scheduled before you get to eat your school lunch. And so on.

Thus, if a student who lives in a secure neighborhood, in a secure home, with parents who are financially secure enough to provide regular meals and other kinds of support gets an A on the exam, and a student who lives in a dangerous neighborhood, who has had to move three times already this year (changing schools along the way), who sleeps on a mat on the floor in an apartment with thin walls through which she can hear the neighbors fighting until well after midnight, and whose mom is working three jobs just to make ends meet and cannot afford to provide breakfast gets a C on that same standardized exam—does that really reflect the academic merit of each student? If a teacher takes such obstacles into account, though, then those grades are obviously subjective. They are tailored by the expert judgment of a particular teacher about the needs, circumstances, strengths, and growth of a particular student. If the teacher does not take any of these environmental factors into account (perhaps even relying on a blind grading mechanism to ensure they don’t know which exam was marked by which student), then the grade appears more objective, but as I said: it measures outcome, not learning; and that is itself a subjective judgment call about what matters.

All of these factors influence the subjectivity of grades. Nevertheless, we must have a way to measure students’ learning and their grasp of core concepts. We must have a way to give them feedback about their progress. Administrators and school officials like grades because, as numbers, they seem objective. Furthermore, they’re easy to add up and track over time (which is advantageous to teachers as well as administrators and school boards). They’re scalable in a way that more specific written feedback is not. These administrators and school officials rarely stop to ask what those letters and numbers mean—what they are actually measuring. Learning is far more complex than can be measured by any set of numbers, let alone a cumulative course grade or GPA.

And speaking of GPA, let’s talk about the way it’s calculated. Here’s a standard* grading scale:

Percent Grade	Letter Grade	4.0 Scale
97-100	A+	4.0
93-96	A	4.0
90-92	A-	3.7
87-89	B+	3.3
83-86	B	3.0
80-82	B-	2.7
77-79	C+	2.3
73-76	C	2.0
70-72	C-	1.7
67-69	D+	1.3
65-66	D	1.0
Below 65	E/F	0.0

Scores for all graded assignments are totaled up (using weighted algorithms that vary from one class to another) into a final percentage, which is then converted into a letter grade. This reduces the complexity of the data, because it’s the letter grade that gets converted into a GPA. Note that in some cases, a difference of only 1% on a final grade (a score of 89% vs. 90%) results in a loss of .4 points in the calculated GPA—the same as a difference of 5% (an 87% vs. a 92%). The final grade and its attendant GPA tell us nothing about the relative difficulty of the class, what specifically the student actually learned and can implement outside the context of a regimented classroom, or how much progress they made from the beginning of the class to the end. It’s just a letter. It’s just a number.

Anyway, that’s why all grades are subjective.

Sincerely,

Sister Robinson

*Note that I said a standard grading scale, not the standard grading scales. There are variations from one school, academic department, and even one course to another. 

This is my new Betta, Irving Braxiatel. He earns an A+ in Being A Fish. This is the only grade that is completely objective.