In between spurts of drilling vocabulary flashcards, hastily filling out review packets and finally reading that chapter in your textbook, you hit the refresh button more times than you think your browser should let you, seeing if your teacher has finally locked in your grade after the final.
This scenario sound familiar? It’s the fate of students with borderline grades, those who are within a fraction of a point of the letter they want and the letter they hope not to have to settle with.
These concerns often start before the anxiety of finals week. To try and prevent such stress, many students jump on any extra credit opportunity their teachers will give them, from revising essays to doing an extra project. The easiest and most popular seems to be classroom donations.
The idea appears strong: Students can get a few points of extra credit for items brought in during Student Council’s canned food drive or contributions to the recent Soldier Boxes campaign. It also includes, for some teachers, bringing supplies for the classroom.
It is true that providing an extra credit opportunity for the donations boosts the items brought in, allowing the charity drives to be continually successful. These opportunities also help teachers stock up for the next semester on luxury items in a classroom (Kleenex, Germ-X and the like).
But for students who aren’t able to afford 50 canned food items or a variety pack of dry-erase board markers, not only is the opportunity to donate not there, neither is the ability to boost a grade a few points. A few dollars for some hand sanitizer may not seem like a big deal to many people in our community, but to a family on a strict budget, there may not be extra money left over to help stock a teacher’s classroom.
The logic of offering extra credit in this manner seems sound to many in our community. Commonly used supplies like tissues or dry-erase board markers always come in handy. Money for these supplies comes out of the teachers’ pockets, but students are the ones who use the supplies. The students are motivated to help out and are rewarded for their donation. Teachers’ hearts are in the right place when they advocate for students to give back to their community.
But what we are forgetting as a community is that a few dollars for a few extra credit points could be the difference between an A and a B, determined by a student’s economic status rather than his or her performance in the class.
If a teacher still needs to offer extra credit for charity drives or classroom supplies, students who can’t afford to spend money in such a way should be given a different option for extra credit comparable to the points given for purchased goods.
As a community, we should be more aware of how much families are asked to spend for students to be successful in both their academics and activities and the consumer culture we are fostering with these practices. Students should be giving out of the goodness of their hearts, not for the goodness of their grades.