grades really cover up failure to teach.

Or maybe in school you didn’t learn as quickly as you thought other kids did, and rather than considering the idea that you had a different learning strategy, you may have decided that you were “learning-disabled.

If pupils suffer from attention disorders, stress and low grades, perhaps we ought to blame outdated teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms and an unnaturally fast tempo of life.

Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior,

Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.

At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I'd been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don't remember why,

My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education.

A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.

He aquí cómo describía la situación el propio Einstein: Cuando estaba en el séptimo grado en el Luitpold Gymnasium de Múnich, fui convocado por mi tutor, que me expresó el deseo de que yo abandonara el centro. Al decirle yo que no había hecho nada malo, se limitó a contestar: «Su mera presencia hace que la clase me pierda el respeto». Einstein se alegró de poder ayudar al profesor.

The worse I do in school, the more I rebel. I drink, I smoke pot, I act like an ass. I’m dimly aware of the inverse ratio between my grades and my rebellion, but I don’t dwell on it. I prefer Nick’s theory. He says I don’t do well in school because I have a hard-on for the world. It might be the only thing he’s ever said about me that’s halfway accurate. (He typically describes me as a cocky showboater who seeks the limelight. Even my father knows me better than that.) My general demeanor does feel like a hard-on — violent, involuntary, unstoppable — and so I accept it as I accept the many changes in my body.

Grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgment that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades, and the coercion and judgment they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them.

what was my real problem? I knew I was a slow learner, but I had been thinking the same way about it for years. I realized that I was trying to solve my learning problems by thinking the way I’d been taught to think — to just work harder.

At school I was a nuisance, for my father was now Chairman of our Continuation School Board, and I affected airs of near-equality with the teacher that must have galled her; I wanted to argue about everything, expand everything, and generally turn every class into a Socratic powwwow instead of getting on with the curriculum. Probably I made her nervous, as a pupil full of green, fermenting information is so well able to do. I have dealt with many innumerable variations of my younger self in classrooms since then, and have mentally apologized for my tiresomeness.