When high school teacher John O’Connor sought to engage his students, he didn’t use computers or complicated ideas from think tanks and political groups. Instead, he went for something much more elementary.

After spending 15 hours carefully crafting comments on a class set of papers, there’s nothing more depressing than to see those papers parachute, unread,  into the recycling bin at the end of class.

This past school year, I swore, would be different: I would give no grades.  I figured this would force students to read, absorb, and appreciate all the attention I had given their work, rather than just rely on a grade at the end of the paper.

And so I raided my own kids’ art supplies to find animal stamps – value-neutral pictures like turtles, flowers, frogs, fish, and moose.

I chose these stamps carefully, remembering a colleague years ago who tried a similar experiment after assigning a major essay on Moby Dick.   Rather than give grades, he wrote sub-species of whales in large letters across the top of the page.  Ingenious, it seemed, until some students complained about having been labeled Humpback, Killer, or Sperm.

For many of my students, the stamps did the trick. They smiled at the cheery pictures and read the comments to figure out how successfully the assignment had been handled.  Others, however, grew anxious without the certainty of a clear-cut letter grade.

Yet their anxiety produced some surprisingly profound questions:  “What does a turtle mean?” or “Is a flower worth more than a frog?”  “That’s deep,” I’d reply.  “Better read the comments.”

But not everyone shared my enthusiasm for the new system.  Near the end of the first marking period, one student’s mother wondered what was so hard about putting a single letter on the paper so that her daughter knew where she stood in the class?  My answer was both smart-alecky and sincere:  “I put much more than a letter on the paper.  I put entire words, sometimes hundreds of words.  In fact, I have at times written more than my students!”  Another parent said that this was cute and all, but try explaining to a college that her son has a “raccoon” in senior English.

My dream of a classroom without letter grades exploded with first quarter report cards.  Since I had to give letter grades, I decided to use the opportunity for another conversation with students outside of class.   So, we played the “grade game.”  I asked students to name the grade he or she had in mind before I revealed the grade I had written.  We were never more than half a grade apart in any case.  That, too, became a chance to talk, and together we negotiated the grade.   I’m no pushover, but sometimes students convinced me with examples of their effort and their progress.  If not, I used the added opportunity to talk specifically about what the student could do to improve.

I don’t think I’ve solved the problem of grading by any means, but on a year-end evaluation form, one student told me this experiment forced him to read his teacher’s comments for the first time in his entire school life.   In all, the absence of grades led to many more conversations with students – and that, for me, is the ultimate stamp of approval.

John O’Connor is a writer, and a teacher at New Trier High School.

Music Button: Scary Grant, “Chickens on the Wing”, from the CD Sounds of Om V. 6, (Om records)