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Yeah, why do they do that?

Well, it generates a bell curve. Handful of A's, lots of B's and C's, handful ofD's. Plus the F's for not showing up.

Why do they want to generate a bell curve?

Well, mostly they're asked to by their bosses. Sometimes they just want to.

How come?

Because it makes it look like they're teaching challenging material, plus it looks like they're separating the wheat from the chaff.

Wheat from chaff? Why would they do that in a school?

Well, life is about competition, and if students don't--

No. No. Why would they do that in the same school?

I'm sorry--come again?

Don't all the students choose to be in that school? Aren't they all paying the same teachers? Don't those teachers work for them?

Well, yes, but--

So why aren't all the people in a school--teachers and students--competing against other schools rather than pitting classmates against classmates?

Well, they are, but they're doing it with bell curves because other schools areusing bell curves. So classmates competing against classmates is going on everyw

here,which means that in the end, you get the best of the best because they're all--

That makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense.

Don't students know about the bell curve?

Of course they do.

Aren't some of them going to "give up" because they don't like their chances of

getting one of those rare A's if they risk all those hours of effort,so they go for the lesser grades on purpose by deliberately expending less effort? Isn't that just a sensible cost-benefit analysis, depending on youraffinity for risk?

Well, I suppose, but that only helps the bell curve, so--

Shouldn't an "A" reflect a thorough understanding of the material?

Well, of course it should. It does.

Hold that thought for a minute. How about this--if I'm a teacher who's asked toor decides to deliver a bell curve, doesn't that eliminate any possibility

of every student getting an A?

Yes. That's the point.

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Doesn't that mean the school and/or the teacher fundamentally believes that there's no possibility that an entire classroom over the course of a term canthoroughly understand the material?

Well, it's so unlikely that--

Really? No teacher is so good at their job that all their students thoroughly understand all the material by the end of a term?

If they did, it must mean that the teacher didn't push the students enough.

Must it?

Yes.

Why?

Because the class didn't generate a bell curve, and a bell curve shows where stu

dents wind up when they're put on difficult terrain.

Not necessarily. You're equating pushing a group of students to failure as a metric for education. And again, you're pitting your own students againsteach other. Which means they're paying to clobber each other, and the classroomis necessarily adversarial, and in terms of game theory, it's foolish fora student to help another student, and the teacher may as well go about separating the wheat from the chaff rather than thinking of the classroom as a unitcompeting against other classrooms elsewhere, because there's no allowable metric for that.

Are you some kind of communist?

Let's go the other way. A bell curve also makes it impossible for a teacher to fail an entire class. Even though that might accurately describe what happenedduring the term, because the teacher was bad, the content was too ambitious fora term, and/or the students exerted no effort. So the bell curve hides asystemic failure by giving the least-worst A's, the next least-worst B's and soon, and the class looks like it went like every other bell-curved class.

Do you propose giving everyone sippy cups and gold stars for showing up?

I propose the tail is wagging the dog.

I'm saying teachers get away with tricking students with easy examples, not spending thirty seconds in class to tell them to work through harder problemson their own to prepare for exams, and then hammering everyone except the self-starters because of a sin of omission, SIMPLY TO GENERATE A BELL CURVE.

And, unbelievably, this is done so often, students are fine with it.

I propose that bad classes are indistinguishable from good ones if the only metric is a grade, and all the grades are designed to create a bell curve.

I believe bell curves are nefariously iterative, and both students and teachersnot only tacitly accept them, they teach and learn to them, and they game them.

Who the hell are you?

I'm a former bell curve winner with two Ivy League degrees.

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I'm a former executive who has seen plenty of colleagues arranging deck chairs on the Titanic because the vetted flow chart bolstered by the vettedspreadsheet insists that's the next logical step, and there are metrics to answer to.

I'm a teacher now.

One who has been told students were limited when they weren't, who has had classes separated into "high" and "low" and they knew it and bought in, eventhough the only real differences were behavioral, not intellectual--in other words, something a teacher can...teach.

I propose that if metrics warp, they're not really metrics.

Grouchy know-it-all.

Oh, I hope not. Good talk. Sippy cup?