It sounds like he deserved a C+ or perhaps a B-, which would have been fair and wouldn't have done any serious damage.
Re:Tom Robbins on Failure
by mathgladiator on Sunday January 02, 2011 @04:01AM
(#2059777)
I don't think history matters, I think what you are going to do matters. Before I gave him the A, I asked myself:
How well does he know it?
Does he have the tools to know it?
I concluded that he would do well if he had confidence in himself, so I gave him the grade I thought would do him best. Now he has a math degree.
Students grades as predictors of life is too much pressure and forces an unhealthy fear of failure.
I've been meaning to write about how ass-backwards our school system is for punishing failure rather severely rather than embracing convergence.
Story Time:
When I taught calculus I, I had a student that did terribly on the first two tests. With my help and a lot of tutoring from my end, he brought his grade up on the third test to a C and his final was a B.
If I had taken the average and followed instructions from the course coordinater, then I would had to have given him a D in the course which would have fucked him over.
But, I gave him an A.
When he took Calculus 2 in the next semester, he got high A's all by himself.
Loving failure is a big part of education.