Editor’s note: This essay is personal. It’s the story behind why TeachFront exists — a reflection on the system that shaped me and the kind of classrooms I want to help build.
It isn’t a product announcement. It’s a manifesto — a confession, a critique, and a call to re-imagine what learning could feel like when grades stop being currency and start being conversation.
I. The Wound
I grew up on a fault line between two worlds.
In my home world, we lived and breathed grit. My family upheld a tradition of working-class stubbornness — tight budgets, tighter lips, and the constant hum of “make yourself useful.” It came from love — and from a lifetime of knowing how hard their world could be. They just wanted me ready.
In my school world, life was about attitude and armor. I grew up in the thick of an inner-city neighborhood that taught toughness early — gang violence, racial tension, police helicopters circling football games. I was a white kid in majority-Black schools, where the unspoken rule was that caring too much was dangerous. Everyone wore the same mask of apathy — acting cool, unbothered, detached — but underneath, our hearts burned. Anger, pride, fear, hope — it all simmered until it broke into fights in the hallway or a slammed classroom door. I tried to learn that mask, but it never fit. My eagerness was always showing through.
Two worlds: grit and obedience, fire and apathy. Different masks, same rule. You don’t leave. You endure.
As an earnest, curious, book-smart idealist (and an undiagnosed autistic girl to boot), I didn’t belong in either world. Too loquacious and “stuck-up” for one world, too open and eager for the other. I wanted out.
Listening closely for any whisper of escape, I heard my teachers hint at a third world — unseen, half-imagined, but calling to me all the same. The refrain was haunting, hopeful:
Work hard, they whispered. Earn your passage. You’ll belong when you arrive.
I bought my ticket out with the currency of academic perfection. Spotless transcript. Straight As. Perfect scores. Every point was a deposit toward escape.
And every point I earned bought me distance — distance from my classmates, from my family, from any sense of safety. The cost of escape was loneliness. Spitballs in my hair in calculus class (yes, that really happens). Underhanded comments at home.
After high school, I went to college — a decision that felt more like defiance than destiny. My teachers cheered me on; the rest of my world fell silent, watching to see if I’d come back.
When I later said I wanted a PhD, the silence cracked a bit. Someone I love laughed and called people like me “serial scholars afraid to get a real job.” I smiled, but I could feel the steel of it slice between my ribs.
My pocketful of points did fund my escape, but using them to define me **also bought my exile. I was promised belonging but, when I “arrived,” I found the opposite.
Years later, standing in front of my own classroom, PhD in hand, I watched my students repeating the same ritual. They were chasing grades the way I once did — mistaking points for purpose, validation for value. And I realized I couldn’t keep teaching inside that lie.
Points were never about learning. They were about control — about mistaking conformity for worth, about selling the illusion that belonging can be earned.
I used to think I was the exception — that my perfectionism was personal. It wasn’t. The system was built to make us this way.
The hunger, the hierarchy, the illusion of earning our worth — none of it is accidental. It was engineered.
II. The System We Inherited
We like to tell a tidy story about where our schools came from: that public education was a noble idea born from democracy — Horace Mann and his “common schools,” free and open to all. It sounds virtuous. It wasn’t. At least not entirely.¹
Those early reformers weren’t only trying to liberate children; they were also trying to tame them. Schools were built to civilize immigrants, discipline the poor, and reinforce Protestant values in a nation anxious about difference. They called it morality, but it was really obedience with a hymnbook.
And then the factories joined in.
Industrialists didn’t invent public education (contrary to popular belief) — they industrialized it. They took the moral machine and gave it gears. Bells replaced church chimes. Desks lined up like assembly lines. Efficiency became the new holiness. Andrew Carnegie built libraries and manual-training schools to make better workers. George Pullman built schools beside his factories so his employees’ children could learn punctuality first, poetry later.
Factories quite literally built schools — in company towns and mill villages across the country — but more importantly, they built an ethic. They fused the Protestant gospel of self-discipline with the industrial gospel of productivity, and the alloy still holds.
That’s why our classrooms still look like that: students sitting in rows, moving by bell, earning points as proof of virtue. The two moralities — civic and industrial — merged into one seamless doctrine: **obedience masquerading as excellence.**²
And the hierarchy was explicit. The A’s were for executives. The D’s and F’s were for janitors. The system sorted children by the imagined value of their future labor, and we called that meritocracy.
When I walk through the halls of a modern university, I can still hear both hymns playing at once — the hymn of moral purity and the hymn of efficiency — and both are still out of tune.
III. The People Left Out
When we chart the “history of grades,” we often track the prestige schools, the well-documented reformers, the ivy-framed philosophies. Rarely do we ask what grades meant for those who could least afford to fail.
I keep thinking about the students who never made it into the gradebooks our whitewashed histories made holy. The Black girl in the 1930s who earned top marks in a segregated school no white college would accept. The Native boy at Carlisle whose “grades” measured how well he’d forgotten his language. The poor kid in 1950s Nebraska who dropped out after being told he “wasn’t college material.”
The Everyman — everyhuman — has been missing from our stories of educational progress.
That omission is the history.
It’s the proof of who grading was built to serve — and who it quietly erased.
IV. The Psychology of Points
If grades were originally tools of hierarchy, points became the weapon of choice.
I’ve watched my students play the game: calculating exactly how many points they need to “still get an A,” skipping the hard assignment because the risk-reward ratio doesn’t justify it, panicking when Canvas shows a red percentage. They stop asking, “What did I learn?” and start asking, “What’s it worth?”
Research confirms what I see every semester. Studies show that when students equate grades with self-worth, anxiety and disengagement rise; low grades predict drops in self-esteem and spikes in depression.³ ⁴ Another review found that over 80 % of first-year undergraduates define their value by academic performance.⁵
That’s deeply insidious. Points promise objectivity, but they distort motivation. They make learning transactional — a marketplace of partial credit and late-penalty math. Students become accountants of their own inadequacy.
And points don’t even measure what they claim to. An 85.738% might mean you understood about 85% of the content, or that you aced every test but lost homework points, or that you turned in everything late but participated enthusiastically. The number masquerades as objective precision, but it’s smoke and mirrors — an illusion of fairness built atop subjective choices.
V. The Poisoned Metric
People sometimes tell me, “But points aren’t the problem. They’re just a tool.”
And I agree — in theory. Numbers aren’t inherently cruel. A thermometer doesn’t shame you for having a fever.
But we’ve had two centuries to teach students that their numbers are their lifelong worth.
That the grade is the judgment.
That the score is the soul.
So even if we rebuild the math, the meaning remains contaminated. Points have absorbed too much moral residue — they carry the smell of punishment and the shadow of compliance.
It’s not just a system; it’s a culture.
We’ve trained generations to think “ninety means worthy” and “seventy means lazy.” Those numbers are tattooed into the collective psyche. You can’t rinse that off with a better rubric.
That’s why reforming points isn’t enough.
They’ve been poisoned by purpose — created to sort, maintained to control, and weaponized against curiosity.
Could we someday reclaim numbers as neutral descriptors of progress? Maybe. But not yet. Not while students still flinch when they see one.
We’d need a few generations of kinder pedagogies before a number could mean anything other than judgment.
Until then, I say: let’s put the numbers down. Let’s speak the language of growth instead of accounting.
VI. The Moral Reckoning
I’ve reached a point — after years of teaching, after reading study after study, after watching the same heartbreak cycle through cohort after cohort — where I can’t ethically use point-based grading anymore.
I don’t say that judgmentally. I say it as someone who once weaponized points herself. I used to think the 10-point late penalty taught responsibility. I used to think the weighted average rewarded diligence. I used to think curving protected fairness.
Now I see it differently.
Those practices rewarded stability — not brilliance. They privileged students who could afford mistakes. They punished the ones balancing work shifts, siblings, and rent.
The evidence and the empathy have converged. To keep grading with points, knowing what we know, is not neutral. It’s complicity.
VII. The Dream
So what happens if we stop counting?
Picture a classroom where the red pen turns green — where learners aren’t slowed to a stop, pulled over, handed penalties and reprimands for having more to learn.
A classroom where feedback isn’t an officer with a ticket book but a companion with a map.
Where a student can say, “I’m not there yet,” and the system replies, “That’s fine — the road’s still open.”
I’ve seen glimpses of this world in my own courses — when grades reflect mastery instead of arithmetic, when redoing is expected, when learning becomes iterative instead of punitive. Students meet higher expectations with less stress. They breathe again.
Points are insidious because they make us forget that education is part of the human experience. We live, we learn, we grow.
VIII. Epilogue — A Promise
I was the kid counting points.
Now I count people. Because what matters isn’t what we measure, but who we lift.
I believe the future of education will belong to those brave enough to dismantle its flawed arithmetic.
To the teachers willing to say, “Your learning means matters more than my ledger.”
To the students willing to believe that their worth was never meant to be a number.
This is my promise: I will never again confuse obedience with learning.
And this is my invitation: come build something better with me.
Because the future of education isn’t a spreadsheet.
It’s a heartbeat.
And this manifesto is only the beginning.
The next chapter in this story asks the harder question: If not points — then what?
References
- Brookhart, S. M. (2013). A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.
- Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.
- Metsäpelto, R. L., et al. (2020). School grades as predictors of self-esteem and changes in emotional well-being. Int. J. Educ. Res., 99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.101512
- D’Entremont, A. (2018). Grades, self-worth, and mental wellbeing in first-year students. Perspectives on Education and Equity in the Academy.
- Great Schools Partnership (2022). Research Supporting Ten Principles of Grading & Reporting.
