“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate and try to answer. In Buddhism, the koan is a method of teaching that attempts to get students of Buddhist thought into the sort of thinking and attitude that Buddhism as a religion, or thought-system, requires. It’s a tool of critical thinking we could say, one that pushes on your ability to think in a new discourse or a new discipline.

I’ve often borrowed “finger pointing at the moon” to talk about teaching and pedagogy and every year, at the start of the year, my mind drifts back toward it for another go. Although there’s obviously a lot we can say about this koan right now it has me thinking about the relationship to grades and the privileged discourse of the teacher.

We talk a lot in pedagogy about the authority of the teacher and how the teacher can often be a source of disciplinary or other troubling power. I’ve written before – many years ago – about the great Chinese proverb “It is a pleasurable thing to teach.” This has an ambivalent sort of meaning, that the teacher can often be overcome by their own position, thinking they are doing a lot of good when they are really just causing a lot of suffering. There’s also the great Paulo Friere quote, “A teacher must be an authority without being authoritarian.” And Staughton Lynd’s great saying, “You shouldn’t be standing in front of your students, but shoulder to shoulder with them on the issues of the time.” These are all very meaningful teaching ideas to me, and I think about them a lot. I’m not sure what they all mean for my teaching practice, but they are definitely tools for me to reiterate it. The biggest block I find in my way though, is grades.

Grades are the ultimate finger, and most of the teaching authority relies on grades. The reason students attend to what you say and ask and do is because they are concerned about grades. In this sense you are the arm extending the finger, pretty far removed from learning or knowledge in that sense. Grades have too much authority and control in order to be valuable at all. They really best serve as a lighthouse that helps you and the student avoid the shoals.

The other concern with grades that I’m noticing is that they boost a real sense of confidence among students who probably should be a lot more humble and questioning of their own abilities. It’s like they borrowed a book about some topic, and they carry it around, thinking that their presence with the borrowed book is what learning looks like.

The university will not be able to compete with the rising certificate programs, particularly if major companies start to accept or prefer the certificate program over the traditional four year degree. Grades are thought about too much as the evidence of learning and not what they serve as, the payment for labor. The analogy needs to be rethought. Students think of grades as what they deserve for sitting though a class and doing what is asked of them. Professors think of grades as a way to control student behavior and judge student ability. Neither is a good way to think about grades.

Let’s get grades out of the way and move to a system where professors help students create a portfolio of work that showcases what they are best able to do. If you are teaching a public speaking class, like me, this means some sort of recordings. Wouldn’t it be a better use of a semester to help mentor students through a process of reiteration on a presentation to make it look and sound really good for larger audiences? Wouldn’t that be more valuable than giving them a quiz about some made up outline structure that only has value in a glossy, overpriced textbook?

What’s the moon here? What does it mean to get it in a class like public speaking? What should students be able to do at the end of such a course? These are the questions we should use to drive our course, not textbook chapters, quizzes, and midterm exams.