Our Lives Are More Than Scores: The Urgent Need for Humanizing Data in Education
From Provocations V2, Beyond the Two Dimensional Student: Humanizing Data in Education
This piece is from our Provocations Magazine, V2: Beyond the Two-Dimensional Student: Humanizing Data in Education. If you’re tired of the same recycled edu-content and ready for ideas that actually challenge the system, this is for you. Provocations is an exclusive benefit for our paid subscribers—join the educators who refuse to tinker at the edges.
For the majority of my life in school, I was not subjected to grades, scores, or two-dimensional representations of who I was as a person.
I was lucky enough to go to a Montessori school through age 12, where the closest I came to being reduced to a score was taking a standardized test once every three years. At the time, I quite enjoyed the exercise because it meant absolutely nothing about my future, about what I learned, or about who I was as a person. In fact, it was often an interesting puzzle to spend time with my guide after the exam, looking at how the exam questions that were designed with a single answer in mind could, if seen a different way, be answered in a multitude of ways.
This meant that when I left my Montessori school and moved into a traditional New England prep school, I was the student in the class that didn’t ask, “Is this going to be on the test?”
I was the student that wasn’t motivated by good grades, although I often got them. And I was a student that didn’t fret about a grade being lower than what I had expected or hoped.
At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was that my education was humane. That I was allowed to be myself, make mistakes, and not be penalized on my academic record for those mistakes. While my secondary and higher education was often filled with grades and scores, the early experience of learning how to love learning, and seeing learning as pivotal to my own personal development, has guided me for my entire life.