Slave to the grades

Ever see a teacher talk with students about their grades while holding up their gradebook to say, "look at all these Cs, what else could you possibly deserve? Don't look at me, the numbers are clear on this one lil Johnny, you are clearly nothing more than a C student..."

Too many teachers have become slaves to our gradebooks. Too many have relinquished our professional judgement to a peice of paper with rows and columns. We average our averages and feel compelled to use the data as our primary method of assessing children, and if the average comes out a little off, we secretly feel ashamed if we 'fudge' the grade - or worse yet, we feel obligated to keep the innacurate average.