112 - Squaring the Circle: Excellence vs Expertise with Jeff Anderson

Episode 112 • 2nd September 2025 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

112 - Jeff Squaring the circle

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Jeff: One of the challenges that we have in our classes is we don't have such privilege. I have sometimes in a 40 person class, I have 25 or 30 different intended majors. The idea that I as an individual and that's in one class now multiply that by three classes, I might be serving anywhere to 50 to 60 different majors. And the idea that I as an expert, I'm going to be able to determine how those people are going to use the, that one person can determine 60 different pathways, I think is an unfair representation of what expertise is. Do you ever hear about the UCLA Rethinking Calculus Project?

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast. Where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students', learning from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We'll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students' success. I'm Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I'm Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing well. The semester has started. We had a fundraiser for the theater this past weekend that went well. Both of my kids, it hit me just yesterday I said, or today, I think I said to my younger one, he has started his senior year of college. The other one has started his last year. So I might have both of them graduating, one in December, one in May. And it's starting to hit me, and that's like really exciting. It's a whole new era of launching my children. So it's, yeah. I'm feeling good today. I'm feeling good. How about you, Boz?

Boz: Not bad. I had, I was a little bit further back a couple weeks ago, but I had a similar like epiphany. So my youngest daughter is in sixth grade, but her elementary is K through six. And my oldest daughter went to that same school. So we've been at that school for 14 consecutive years and this is the final of the 14 consecutive years at this school as a parent. And it just, it was one of those just kind of weird things to think about, but it's like, wow, we have really been at this school for a long time.

Sharona: Well, and then of course I am super excited. Like this is, I guarantee gonna be one of the highlights of my week, is this recording? Because we are welcoming back on the pod, Dr. Jeff Anderson. He's been on the pod several times. Amazing thinker and one of the keynotes from our conference this summer. So welcome back Jeff. So glad to have you back.

Jeff: It's really good to be here, good to see you both, good to hear your voices. I love the centering of family. Thank you so much for having me. I can't wait for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it.

Sharona: I was going to say any major children milestones that we should touch on?

Jeff: Yeah. My younger son turned eight six, no, no, seven. Seven seven I averaged. He turned seven in August and then my older son turns nine in September. And just yesterday we did a, what was for me, a 16 hour day? What was for them, a four hour party. So we're coming down. I took a nap today and did a bunch of cleaning and all that stuff. We don't start until late September, so I'm still kind of enjoying a little bit of self-care time before everything ramped up again. So.

Sharona: And you spared some of it to talk to us. That's amazing.

Jeff: This is something I, God, I love your work. The two of you are just amazing. Thank you. Well, thank you.

Sharona: So this is the first time we've had you on the pod since the conference. So I did wanna ask you what was your experience of being a keynote at the grading conference this year?

Jeff: I had a ball preparing for that conference. I think, I forget when that email went out. I think maybe Ashley Fox took the lead on that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I, it might've been last August.

Sharona: I think it was the smidge later, but yeah, August, September, October, somewhere in there.

Jeff: Somewhere, yeah. Early fall, because my, once I got that email I tried to give like 10 to 20 hours a month. Towards that project. And I wanted, there's something that I love doing is open and transparent. It means I go much slower than if I had a large firm behind my production time. But one of the goals that I had was to put into written form a number of ideas that I use to guide my grading principles. And then for every one of those ideas in my math classes, I have this, what I call Joe Bowler calls this multiple representations I call it. I, I used to have this acronym when I was a younger teacher called Van Visa Verbal Aita language, nerdy language, visual interest inquiry symbolic representation and notation. And then I forget what the other a was for.

As I grew older, I started to really expand that so that any one math idea students hit as many categories as they can to represent in that their mind. So as I was preparing for that conference, I tried to do the same thing. I tried to put into blog form many of the ideas that I wanted to touch upon and then have a visual representation of that. So I was teaching myself Adobe Illustrate and stuff like that. So by the time I got into that room, at minimum of a hundred hours, something like 150 probably if I actually logged it just for that talk. And then the crazy thing was that that was, we were still, I think we were two weeks before finals. So for a lot of my semester I was a little bit jealous of my semester brothers and sisters, because I wanted to be a larger part of the conference as a whole. But I decided to invest everything that I could into the experience of the keynote. And then I think right as I left that water cooler, I had two more meetings that day. I had some stuff going on with the students in the afternoon. And I was still working with 150 students. So that was a little bit sad for me that I wasn't able to fully invest in the other parts of the conference. But from the standpoint of the talk I gave the best that I could. I'm a little bit nervous 'cause I didn't pull back.

Boz: No, you, you absolutely did not. And that was one of my favorite parts about your keynote is. Yeah, you didn't pull a single punch and it, and it got reaction. And you mentioned the water cooler room afterwards. So for any of our listeners that's not been to the conference, what we've started doing over the last couple years is we'll have breaks between our sessions 'cause it is a you know, online conference and, you know, you, you get tired sitting on a computer screen. So we give nice, decent length of breaks. But for anyone that wants to stay on and talk about one of the sessions or really just talk about anything, we have what we call these water cooler rooms. And that one, after yours was extremely active. And there were some people that had some questions and some objections to some of your keynote, which I think is great 'cause it got people talking, which is regardless of where you land. Just having the conversation, having some open conversation, having some debates. That's where we really push this and where we really learn.

Jeff: I would Sharona, I'd love to hear.

Sharona: Well, so one of the things that occurs to me thinking about your keynote is, like you said, you didn't pull any punches. I mean, you basically called grades, cigarettes. And

Boz: basically you did,

Sharona: which I just, I love that so much. But, and that, that it's learning cancer. And I just gave a mini course on alternative grading a couple weeks ago at Math Fest, and I got some feedback after the first session that people were feeling badly because I said that grades were traumatizing and that they basically felt that I was shaming them for traumatizing their students. And I had to think about that. And I had to think, am I, do I need to pull back this language? And I decided that I was not gonna pull back the language, but I do wanna pull back the shame because the reality is I am still complicit in the system and there are many of us who are in the system that do not have the power to change it completely.

So I thought of you as I was thinking of formulating my response and when I went into the second day of the mini course, I said, I wanna be very clear, yes, I believe grades are traumatizing and I am still here and I'm still doing this, and you all are still doing this, and I need you to stay in the classroom. I need you to continue to do what you can, even if you can't go all the way, because it's the only way we're gonna change the system.

Jeff: So yeah, I love how healing and when I, when I come to this space, I feel healing and I just really appreciate that for the validation, the kindness, the empathy. Yeah, and that's a hard, it's hard to a question that I love asking is, are we the same thing as our behaviors? Another way to ask that question is, is it possible that my intention doesn't align with the impact that my actions have? Right. And it, it's such a hard reality to grapple with for teachers because so many teachers become teachers because we love the idea of education. We love the idea of impacting young people. We love the idea of empowering. And I definitely recognize the challenge that comes from coming to terms with the idea that we are implementing strategies that can be harmful despite our own intention, right?

And so cheers to you for validating that and for saying it. And yeah, my hope was to inspire what I call sweet spot learning. That comes from that model of deep learning comfort zone, sweet spot, survival zone. And it turns out that like when we push ourselves past our boundaries, that's where growth can happen is actually required. And I think part of something that I really love in this space is this idea of critical consciousness. I think you all do a really good job of raising critical consciousness where we can critique the system, but it is very hard when, this is why in our first podcast I talk about healing and why healing is so important. Because I think so many teachers have internalized the message of brilliance and smartness and doing well because in order to get our jobs, we've done that and then all of a sudden to hear that that system might be harmful for a lot of people, that feels, that can definitely feel like an attack on the self, right. And that's a hard line to draw.

My hope was to take some of the pressure off of your shoulders. That was my, that was my prayer, right? That you can point to someone else and say, well, that's how he talks about it. This is how we talk about it, et cetera. Right?

Boz: Alright, so ev everyone heard that we've got permission, blame Jeff for everything.

Sharona: Yes. Yes, jeff's shoulders are big enough. All the things I say that hurt you are, they're coming from Jeff, but, okay. So I thought that the conference was amazing. Your keynote was exactly sort of the very hard hitting. I mean, you went. I think you were last, were you the last, you know, was Right. So we had already sort of been kind to a lot of our participants. We'd broken things down, we'd given some examples, we then hit them with you at the end, which is awesome. But it resonates over time. Right? , And one of the things that's been amazing, I was, like I said, I was at Math Fest, the number of people who said I went to the Grading Conference in such and such a year, and now I tried something and now I'm in the classroom. And I think that's amazing.

But you, when we talked about you coming back on you, you talked about this idea of power. So I've been sort of grappling with, you know, I'm probably going back into the classroom in the spring. I've only been out of the classroom a year and a half at, well, a year and then this semester. But I might be teaching some classes that I have never taught before and I'm one of the things that keeps coming up. Well, there's two things. Number one. Do you give too many a's? That's one question that keeps coming up to me. And I mean, my short answer is no, but there's a more complex answer we need to give. But the second one is if I really want students to retain certain knowledge over a period of time, the number one way people talk about making students do that is grades. And that feels coercive. And yet I also don't wanna completely throw it out and disregard it and saying, no, I don't care when they learn it, and I don't care how long they retain it. So I kind of wanted to get a sense of how my questions, how I'm grappling with this feeds into what you've been thinking about about power.

Jeff: So let me, let me make sure I'm understanding the questions. The first question is that, how do we respond to, some people call it grade inflation, but the accusation that there should be a limited number of A's, and any teacher that departs from that is somehow doing injustice both within their class and within the larger society. Yep. Yeah. And then the, the second one to kind of, can you hash out the second part of that question? Like the,

Sharona: so in the classes that I've taught up to this point using alternative grading, my philosophy has been show it to me twice. I don't care when beginning of the semester, middle semester end, the semester, I don't care. And as soon as you show it to me twice you're done for the semester with that piece of content, I don't need to see anything further. Yeah. And so there's an accusation that basically the stuff they learn early, they can just go ahead and forget by the end of the course. And that there's some sort of responsibility I might have as an instructor. To make sure that they retain it for more than just long enough that it takes to take the test. And of course, I mean, the first pushback is, well, you're not doing that with traditional grading no matter what you think. But nonetheless, taking the argument out of the context of that's a red herring and really grappling with it for myself. Yeah. I was trying to think about do I have a responsibility?

And the course that is specifically under discussion is pre-calculus. Do I have a, some sort of responsibility to try to get my students to retain stuff that they show me early that they can do by assessing it again later? And to me, that feels coercive and controlling as far as behavior. But, should I, should I really be trying to utilize my grades in this way? Or at least if not grades, at least running assessments at the end of the semester to check on their learning for the whole semester. So it's all that sort of, I don't know if that was any clearer, but that's.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, so what I hear is I would call this like the content centered you know behavioral approach to coercion, like you, so basically the premise of it is if the students are not constantly being peppered with content, somehow you are doing them injustice to their future. And thus your skill as a teacher is diminished, right? You have to make sure that these students have those foundations. Just because you've checked it twice doesn't mean it's gonna be there forever. And just that whole kind of series of attacks on what it means to rethink our work in the classroom, right?

Sharona: Yeah. And there's just something that I am hoping that you've thought more about because this idea does not sit well with me, but I don't have the brainpower to figure out why it's not sitting well with me.

Jeff: Well, maybe we can say that, you know, as I was a younger man, I used to memorize all 150 names in the first day. And it's not that I don't have the brainpower, it's that I'm like keeping other people alive. Right. So, so like, let's be, I think you have more brainpower than needed, but I also think you do a lot in the world. Yeah. So I guess if one way that I would start this, I, I guess this would go into the theories of power. I don't know if that's a good time to bring it up. I could also directly address the questions as they are

Sharona: No, let's start with the theories of power and then see if they apply to my two specific questions. 'Cause they might or might not.

Jeff: Yeah. The, the reason one thing that I really love doing in this thought process is getting down to the root. So, you know, if you take a belief as a fundamental premise and then look at the behaviors that come out of that belief, often I find for myself that I can really understand where the attacks are coming from. And so as I've developed my philosophy of alternative grading one of the things that I have thought a lot about is what are the fundamental beliefs under the system that we have? Do I agree with those beliefs? And if I do, why? If I don't, why not? If I don't, what are the beliefs I wanna believe in? So what system do I want to come up with to replace the harmful one?

And so I kind of over time I've developed this these two competing theories of power. One of 'em I call the theory of power of ordinary people. And then the other one I called kind of elite power. And they're in direct contradiction to each other, you can't have them simultaneously. You either believe one or the other. For each theory of power, I kind of have what I call locus of control. One of them is individual. The other one is collective. So in the elite theory of power somebody would start with the premise that there exists a hierarchy between people. And at its core, I like to settle that down on a, just compare two people. Just because once you have that initial idea, you can have all the other ones.

So in the elite theory of power somebody will hold a belief that there exists a hierarchy between person A and person B. One of those is better, one of those is worse, and it's a, a hierarchy ordained by nature, or God or nurture doesn't matter, but some sort of supremacy. And perhaps since A comes before B. In lexigraphical ordering, we say a greater than B. Alright, so if you start with that premise, the moment that you say that one person is better than another person. Well, one, you're actually collapsing humanity onto a single axis, right? So you're taking a very complex thing, which is the identity of a human being within the world. And then you're just saying like you can rank and sort people against each other. And you can do that just with two people. And then the moment you get that, you can do that with two people, you can start to come up with a continuum, right? So you can say, person A better than person B, better than person C. We'll pretend it's a transitive relation. So person A is often better than person C. And then what's really interesting about that is that the moment that I can start naming that belief out loud, we can then go back in history and look at all the places that that belief system has produced social structures.

t's entire spectrum. Let's do: 1930

And, you know, I, I can keep going. In India, the Brahmans, the dalids, right? The untouchables? In our grading system that shows up because, and let's just name it out loud which students are the best students.

Sharona: The ones who did the most A's.

Jeff: Right. And so the moment that we identify that I would say that I can trace back the practice of grading to a desire to rank and sort people. Another way to say that is that the practice of grading is actually situated in a belief in elite hierarchies. So when, and then when that happens is the person who's doling out the grade is being asked to uphold those hierarchies. And this relates to this idea of artificial scarcity, which I think is really powerful. Because, in that system, one of the premises, one of the reasons, I thought a lot about like, why would somebody assume, this elite theory of power. And the elite theory of power is there are some people who are powerful, ordained by nature or by God and some people who are less powerful. And so in the elite theory of power, what we gotta do is we gotta identify the powerful and then endow them with special privileges to control the least powerful people. Because if we do that, then social order will reign. And I've thought a lot about like, why would somebody do that?

And I think it has to do with theories of control and fear of death, right? Like, we're all gonna die. There's something called existential insecurity. Like everybody on earth is gonna die. And the moment that we realize that, we might perhaps be a little scared. And it turns out that if you can control resources, you have a much less high probability of dying by somebody else's hand. Right? That's a separate story about like why do this. But the point is just to identify that that is one theory of power and the implications of that theory of power is that those who deem themselves elite want to put themselves in control of resources, often at the expense of those who are deemed as untouchables or inhuman, et cetera. Right?

And the reason that I bring this up is that this is the grading system which students are deemed as elite A students, which students get the best treatment from our entire academic system, which students are deemed as inferior, and which students are cut loose by our system. Right. And, and so, and there's a lot of other things here too, right? Like the interesting thing about understanding like the elite theory of power is that it actually, you can start to talk about intersectionality. You could talk about how grades and school systems often reinforce other what you might call oppressive systems in society. They're mutually supportive of each other, right? So you can use our current you know what, Steven Miller I forget the guy, it's the guy that is propagating the attack on public schools right now. He was on Roth Dahlfitz and New York Time. I forget his name right now. If I think about it for a bit, it will come back.

Boz: I was gonna say, are you sure there's only one name that.

Jeff: Yeah, no. Yeah. And so, you know, in that mechanism, really the structure of identifying hierarchies is used to attack groups that are labeled inferior and used to kind of hoard resources for elite power. And you know, I don't know if we wanna do the whole thought experiment on what I call a faux libertarianism. It's really discussing this fiction of artificial scarcity.

So in mathematics, do you remember this concept of a convex combination? I don't. So the in convex combination, let's say that I have $20 and I need to get dinner and gas, and I only have 20 bucks. The more I spend on dinner, the less I spend on gas and vice versa, because X one is the amount I spend on dinner. X two is the amount I spend on gas. They're in direct conflict. 'cause the total amount that I have is 20. So that's an example of a twosome or a twosome and convex combination. Another great one that I use with my students is the combination of total number of hours in a week. So a lot of my students who come in who don't know how to be students yet will sign up for 28 units. They're working 30 hours a week and they take care of their grandmother with dementia. And then the crazy thing is the quarter starts, they don't recognize that as a problem. 'cause in their mind, 28 hours, well 28 units is 28 hours, right? Yeah.

So what we do is we go through this process of starting to have them be accountable for the time in classes. And so what I say is T1 equals the amount of time you spend studying T2 equals the amount of time you spend at work, T3 the amount of time you spend in class. And if you add all those up, you get 1 68 a week, right? It's a convex combination. If I spend more time working, what happens to everything else?

Boz: Something has to go down.

Sharona: And I have a funny note on that. My kids went to a high school, very, very privileged elite public school, okay? Top one of the top. And the very first thing they do each year is they actually hand you that 168 hours. And they have a whole worksheet. This is from the counselors to the parents, particularly. If you're in sports this is how many each time you're probably anticipating each of these classes, like they list them. AP takes this many hours, regular honors takes this many regular class, and how much time are you gonna sleep and how much time? What's your commute? And you actually have to fill this whole document out and give it back to counseling to exactly point out you only have 168 hours. Yep.

Jeff: Yeah. And this is, I'm so happy that you said this because what I've found in the elite theory of power, it's there's actually a lot of misdirection used. So it is very much the case that our elite education system, I call this front running, or you could call it front loading as well, the way that our schools are designed is that they are a game. Like you can play the game well by knowing the rules of the game before you get in. So there's this whole cultural element of school. Joe Feldman in his book, he calls this lifting the veil. One of the things that happens is that students of elite education often are better informed about and have been able to learn what you call, what I would call system navigation skills. And then the system misdiagnoses that as talent. Whereas really it's just they've got to peer behind the curtain and they have these skills to protect themselves.

Whereas students from lower classes who are not exposed to that culture come in blind. Right? And so they're making the decisions. And then we misdiagnose what. This is why the elite theory of power is really nice, because it turns out that if you're gonna help students who don't know how to deal with the culture, you actually have to spend time with them. Whereas if you can say, oh, they must be dumb, they're obviously not great students, label 'em as F not our problem anymore. You can disassociate your responsibility to help them and basically just cut them loose from who's on the in crowd, right?

And so what happens is that using the grading system, you reinforce those preexisting hierarchies. But if we get back to this concept of convex combination, I've been thinking a lot about within, probably about a year ago is when I first started to develop this. One of the ways that this misdirection works is that it's, socialism for the ultra wealthy and brutal capitalism for the rest of people. So it always makes me laugh when I hear this idea of artificial scarcity, that that artificial scarcity is always in the lower classes. And yet when Elon Musk talks about the value of his stock, it can go off to infinity, right? And this is a direct contradiction. You can't simultaneously say we have artificial scarcity, and the stock goes off into infinity. Until you realize that the stock going off to infinity depends on the artificial scarcity of everything else. So those are actually two sides of the same coin.

One of them is the Horatio Alger lie. If you work hard enough, you'll become a billionaire with us, like us. And one of the things I love to do with my students is start to have them actually deconstruct that myth. So the way that I do this is I say, let's imagine that we had how many people on Earth right now? 8 billion something?

Boz: Eight, eight point something. Yeah.

Jeff: Alright, so I don't know. So one question is what is wealth? Right, and I promise this comes back to your question about the number of A's, because really the number of A's thing is about artificial scarcity, right? Mm-hmm. It's about upholding artificial scarcity. And the people who do that have not really thought critically. All they know is that the social structure. From my experience, when I actually start digging into those dialogues, what I find is that what they're really saying is, this is how I was taught and I'd like to propagate it because it worked for me. And what I like to do at that moment is I like to explore a little bit deeper. So one question that I love to ask my students is, what is wealth ? How would we measure wealth?

So in particular, if you take every human and let's assign a variable to them, call it W Sub I. So the I human has a variable W that is their total wealth. All right. I debate the idea that total wealth is only financial, but if it's a mathematical model, we have to quantify. So what would we say? Maybe amount of money in the bank assets.

Sharona: I mean, are we doing net worth or, or gross, right?

Jeff: Let's do gross. So let's not do the derivative. Let's actually do the integral. Let's take the sum of the amount of wealth you control, right? Okay. So basically you have this set of 8 billion variables, which, or eight, I mean however many people on earth. And each person has a number associated with it. And then the question is, what happens if you add every single one of those up? Question is that infinite? And then the moment that you start asking that question, one of the things is, well, what does it mean to produce wealth? Usually takes students a little bit of time to get to this, but it turns out that like resources, labor , human capital knowledge. Okay, so question, resources, infinite or finite.

Boz: What resources?

Jeff: Raw materials to make any product on earth.

Boz: Finite.

Jeff: Finite. Okay. Resources are finite. Labor. The number of hours that we can possibly work. The ai. People don't want me to say this.

Sharona: Yeah, definitely finite.

Jeff: Finite. Okay. Human capital. The amount of wisdom that we can produce over the ages. Finite or infinite?

Sharona: Potentially infinite, I would argue.

Jeff: Except that it's time-based. Like if you think about how, right. So you it's impossible to produce knowledge without time. Right. And the moment that you, so, okay. The moment that we realize that knowledge is about time, finite or infinite?

Sharona: Finite.

Jeff: Okay, so what that means is that the total amount of wealth on earth, if you say that wealth comes from financial wealth, comes from resources, labor and knowledge put put to good use, and you add up every single one of those variables, guess what's on the right hand side? Infinite number or a finite concrete bounded number.

Sharona: Definitely bounded.

Jeff: Okay. So now the really interesting thing about that is turns out that that total wealth, it's, in school, I always say like 260 trillion. And one of my students looked it up and I was, my order of magnitude was right. The scaler was wrong, but like the number of zeros that I had was right. Whatever it is, let's say it's 300 trillion total wealth on earth right now. Financial. We're financializing it. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so W one plus W2 plus W three plus W four. Well, guess what happens if you take one of those Ws and you start to shoot it up as high as you can shoot it.

Sharona: Another one has to go down.

Jeff: At least one of those other ones have to go down. And the funny thing is, if you look at global wealth distribution at this moment, we are not taking just one of those. We take like 5,000 of those and then we impose the condition of exponential return on assets, right? So this is the statistic I forget in Zuckerman's book, the capital in the 21st century, and then his follow up, that the top 5,000 people on Earth own more than the bottom 70%. I forget what the exact statistic is. But that's the idea that if you have infinite growth in the top sector, and infinite of course is year after year, quarter after quarter, exponential return, well guess what happens to the rest of society.

Sharona: Just gets obliterated.

Jeff: Yeah. And so the moment that you start to realize that, you actually need an education system that imposes artificial scarcity in order to kind of fuel the exponential growth of the supreme earners. And you also need a justification because it turns out that when people realize they're being robbed doesn't feel very good, right? So what instead what you do is you replace the thievery with a narrative about, oh, you are not rich because you're not worthy. The reason that you're failing is because somehow you are inferior. What you need to do is train yourself to be like the superior. You know, and if you work hard enough and you follow our rules, you'll get there someday. Even you can be a billionaire. That's what the whole premise of the Apprentice was right? It's what the premise of the, what's that show with Mark Cuban?

Boz: Well, I don't know the show, but it's the premise of the American way. I mean that, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard and you'll be successful.

Jeff: Yep. Yeah. And so I just like, what, what's really interesting about that is that I find that the discussion of number of, A's what that attack is really saying is in the world we have artificial scarcity, which is true. That's not a false statement. The thing that really bothers me is that that artificial scarcity is felt most by, let's say the bottom 99%. In order to fuel the exponential return. And in that model, I actually like to, I really like to push Poverty by America. This book by Matthew Desmond. He likes to talk about poverty abolition. So what poverty abolition says is that each of those WI's should have a lower bound. So let's say that the wealth of the lowest untouchable person in society should be no less than what it was required to re maintain homeostasis.

There's a book that came out recently by a woman named Ingrid Robbins, who says that each of those wealth should also have an upper bound, because you can't impose a lower bound without an upper bound. You know what her upper bound is? Did we talk about this already? No. Mm-hmm. $10 million. For life. In that book, her libertarianism says that no one person should, should accumulate more than $10 million. And if they do, governments should actually step in to redistribute.

The moment that we start thinking like that, the argument for artificial scarcity falls apart. Because if you look at the total amount of wealth, so let's say it's $300 trillion and you def define divide by 8 billion, and I am not, one of my students once called me a communist and I haven't done enough research to refute them. Like I haven't read enough communist stuff to refute them.

In my heart, I love democracy. I love the idea that people can determine for themselves what they wanna do, which is this alternate theory of power, the power of ordinary people. But it is really important to grapple in democracy. Democracy is about governance by the group and in governance by the group. You have to grapple with the distribution of resources. So one of the things that I think is really important when I hear this argument that the number of A's that we give should be capped. To me, that argument is really upholding a belief in supremacy. Only a certain number of people can be elite. And if you are not upholding that somehow, something's wrong with you.

And I would actually say that I don't buy into that. I actually have an entire separate thing in my grading, which is grounded in the theory of expertise, the science of expertise that every person can reach for excellence in their own life. And my job is not to rank and sort people. My job is actually to cultivate excellence on an individual basis with each of my students. And by definition, that excellence is gonna take a different form. So in that excellence, that the alternative theory for the elite power structure in elite power, what the whole goal of education is to rank and sort people and then give control of resources to those deemed elite, right? And so what happens is when you hear those arguments, you're really hearing somebody trying to uphold that structure.

Whereas in my situation, I like to say, listen, I'm gonna ground a different theory of power. I'm gonna call that theory of power, the power of ordinary people. I'm gonna have two versions of it. I'm gonna have an individual version of it, I'm gonna have a group version of it. The individual version is that people are capable of extraordinary things. They can learn how to train their mind, and there are training mechanisms that we can use as teachers to tap into that excellence. I call that like evolutionary biology, that like the way that our brains developed over eons. There are certain training mechanisms that we can use to help people tap into their native brilliance at an individual space.

And then the second one is, as each person becomes self-actualize, we in communities can actually leverage the power of collective action to solve collective problems. So you might call like that the theory of excellence of ordinary people working together. And in that model, I actually don't need to engage with this idea of artificial scarcity. We do need to deal with the concept of limited resources. That's something that as a society we have to work on. But in a healthy, democratic society, at least the ideal, the populace as a whole can figure that out. It doesn't have to be left into the hands of people like Elon Musk who are all takers and no givers.

I just was reading an article two days ago. A year ago NASA JPL let go of 800 NASA employees in their, their thing. Right. Just two days ago, the New York Times published this article turns out in billions of SpaceX contract, do you know how much taxes they're trying to pay?

Sharona: Yeah, zero.

But I have a question I wanna ask you about this excellence thing and relate to grades. Because we've talked with a lot of people, there there's definitely like the harsh artificial scarcity, right? Which is, I'll only give 10% or things like that. But even in my own classes, not everybody earns an A. And it's not because I couldn't give them one, but the way that I've redefined it is there is a quantitative difference between how much a student has demonstrated of their learning to get an A versus how much they've learned to get a B. Is that still playing into artificial scarcity? Or is there a place for, especially if you're talking about excellence and expertise. Yeah. Not everybody is the same level of expertise in a given topic or subject. Is grades the right place to distinguish those?

Jeff: Yeah. So I guess one of the things that I struggle with on this is that the desire to rank and sort people is really imposing like a race, like a running race. It has a clear winner, a clear loser, and it's timed. Mm-hmm. And one of the really interesting things about this challenge is that when once we're forced to project the complex identities of our students onto a single access with five buckets, what ends up happening is we were erase the starting point.

So there are students who, this is what I was saying. If you put me into a linear algebra class at Gavelin, before that race has started, I've already passed the finish line, right? And so what happens is when we do this thing as teachers, where we say all students have to, this is where content expertise, Jeff Schinske's episode with you all talk about this. And he has some great research papers that he's, there's one called the Tyranny of Content. So that's a great paper. And this is the same struggle that when we mark student achievement based on content and content alone, we end up forcing ourselves to reinforce that hierarchy.

Because what it does is it says, I don't care where you started. I don't care anything about your home life, any challenges that you face at the end of this predetermined period that you do not control. I will be assessing you on all of this content. If you can hit it, you will be marked as sufficient by me. If you can't hit it, you will suffer a penalty that is enforced by the system. And what ends up happening in that space is that we are forcing all students into a small bucket.

And so the thing that I would say is actually excellence, the really nice thing about thinking about excellence is it's not one dimensional . And more important, for me, excellence is more than just content. This gets into the book Grit and the idea of what I call intrinsic motivation. What's the likeliness that somebody's gonna become excellent in content in I'm given 12 weeks. Like what's the likeliness that they can become really excellent in that content in 12 weeks?

Boz: Depends on where they start.

Jeff: That's true. But let's say a novice.

Boz: In 12 weeks. Depending on how much content you're trying to become an expert in. And what do you define as an expert? I mean, I know one of my role models, not just for education but in general, is Bruce Lee and some of the things that he talked about with, doing a single task hundreds of thousands of times is what it takes to become excellent. And his definition of excellence is your body can do it without you thinking about it. So. You know,

Jeff: I love it.

Boz: What do you define as excellent? But yeah, it in a 12 week time. Yep.

Sharona: Yep. One of the challenges is that I'm having with, even with this conversation is there's the word excellent, there's the word expert. Right? Those are not exactly the same thing. Yep. And my definition of excellence is actually very different from even Bruce Lee's because I once did the Landmark Forum, which is very controversial in some places, but they actually define excellence. They call it a standing in the moment, intending for the fulfillment of a possibility.

So you created some possibility for yourself. And excellence instead of being a journey to excellence, is a moment by moment behavior. And I love that. And you can be excellent in intending to learn mathematics and still not have learned the mathematics. And so as long as I am working in a system that has semesters and timeframes, like you say, and I have not yet been able to burn it all down the way Bosley and many other people want to, if I'm living in a 15 week semester with an end of term grade A, B, C, D, F, or A B, C, no credit or whatever, is there a role for using those letter grades that does meet my personal objectives, which is to help students learn and communicate to them that they will potentially be successful in the subsequent course.

Jeff: The more I've grappled with that question. I love the grappling. One of the things as I listen to you over months, and I think at this point years, one of the I call those intellectual curiosity and the process towards growth. So my motto is, I suck today, but a little less than yesterday. And I just, I love the constant reflection and questioning and introspection that you bring into the space, Sharona. It's something that I aspire for and that I respect deeply. When I have gone down that road, I have come to the conclusion that as long as I uphold that ranking system, it is in direct conflict with I some what's his name? Mihae that he talks about flow. The so the one that you just gave from the landmark flow form the form. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Say that one more again. I want to, I didn't get a chance to write.

Sharona: Excellence Is standing in the moment intending for the fulfillment of a possibility. And yeah, it very much is, another way that they say it is you know how you have those moments where you're in the zone. Like most of us, we can't necessarily predict when we'll be in the zone, but we know when we're in it and it's because whatever we're doing, we are being excellent in the moment.

Jeff: Yep.

Sharona: And that is something, I mean, I took the Landmark Forum now, probably 15 years ago. And it is still something that defines me on a day-to-day basis. Like if I'm like, God, I wanna be excellent, I have to stop, I have to create a possibility. And then I have to say to myself, what can I do right now to intend to fulfill that possibility? And if I do that, I'm then excellent in that moment. Yep. And I, but I am still grappling with, I agree with all you're, what you're saying about ranking and sorting and power. And at the end of the day, in order to be able to build a cell phone, you have to have people who know what they're doing with the science.

Jeff: Oh yeah. And so, no doubt.

Sharona: How do we as a STEM educator particularly, how do I balance the fact that I don't want to lie to a student and say, sure, you're ready to go on. You will be successful. If they can't do the mathematics. Even if it's not all of it. But if I feel that they have not met whatever bar I as the elite person, because I'm now the instructor, right. So I have a power thing there. But there is someone who has to be there who does know the science to tell the student whether or not the student knows the science. 'cause at some point, someone has to know the science.

Jeff: Yeah. And I don't like, so one thing. I love it. I absolutely love it. One of the things, can I respond to that? Yeah, yeah. Like this. So one thing that I think is really makes this conversation very hard. I like to think about the difference between somebody going for medical school versus my class in mathematics. What's nice about medical school is that there's a democratic process of determining what curriculum goes into the first three years, and it's universal. Of course there's gonna be specialties in all this, but like most doctors study human anatomy. They study organic chemistry. They study a certain set of curriculum that the AMA, the American Medical Association, is going to say this is the minimum requirement. So what's nice about that is that there is a kind of a uniformity that allows for this idea of competency.

One of the challenges that we have in our classes is we don't have such privilege. I have sometimes in a 40 person class, I have 25 or 30 different intended majors. The idea that I as an individual and that's in one class, now multiply that by three classes, I might be serving anywhere to 50 to 60 different majors. And the idea that I as an expert am going to be able to determine how those people are gonna use the, that one person can determine 60 different pathways, I think is an unfair representation of what expertise is. Do you ever hear about the UCLA Rethinking Calculus project? I forget that formal title of that, where they were redoing the calculus curriculum?

Boz: I've heard a little bit about it. I don't know details, but just from some of my friends and colleagues at center X and stuff, I've heard a little about it.

Jeff: Yeah. And the premise behind that was that too often college math teachers mess up their students' future by emphasizing the wrong content. That's an example, right? Those teachers can say to themselves, oh, my students are not good enough in this X, y, and Z content, and have absolutely no concept of the future trajectory of some of the students. So by taking their students and forcing their students into a bucket on one bit of content that that particular teacher thought was important, they've actually done harm to their student's future because what actually that student needed was something else.

And so the reason that I bring that up is that one of the challenges that the content premise, like this idea, I agree with you Sharona, that it is really important for students to get feedback and to know that they know the material. I agree with you that content expertise is important. Where I struggle is the concept that one teacher can have infinite wisdom in determining exactly which content the students are gonna need, how much to force that content onto students, and then what that actually means in their future.

In fact, I like to make that I don't know dialogue much more complex. And the answer that I would say is excellence is a habit, not a destination. And if I'm serious about I don't know if I can tell a little parable right now that's coming up as we're talking.

Sharona: Sure.

cal nodal analysis. I call it: 1975

So in winter of this year, I had a guy in one of my classes, very bright guy. Really do well with that algorithm. I mean, he probably spent 50 hours on it. He had a stack of papers. He understood it. And then in spring he went onto the circuits class. Now the funny thing is he was working on a MATLAB representation that would let him solve almost every single problem in the circuit analysis class for himself so he could check his own work. But he had to be really careful not to show it to the teacher. 'Cause the teacher wouldn't understand it. Quite literally, he knew more about that algorithm in the current method than the teacher of the class. Guess what happened is he got into the next class? F. So he had really, really high expertise in his. More expertise, I would argue, than the teacher of the class for that particular, six weeks of the course. And he got an F you know, why he got an F?

Sharona: Because he wasn't using the algorithm the teacher wanted.

Jeff: The teacher had a bunch of really strict rules in his class that did not allow this man to shine. Moreover, when I met him, I would say he was undiagnosed, ADHD. So, he had a bunch of learning needs that had never been integrated into the system. And I'm quite certain that teacher never got to know that and imposed structures on top of the class that not only didn't allow the guy to shine that actively put up barriers. And so what happens is I find this to be a narrative that allows misbeliefs. The narrative that somehow I'm gonna impose a certain amount of content on my students. And that content and that content alone will be the thing that allows my students to succeed. Really takes my focus onto the content and away from the student. And my counter proposal, I just got a text from him over the summer because I want to interview him. I want to get his voice on my YouTube channel as a inspiration for future students.

And he said something, he said, you know, Jeff, I should actually just read it to you. He said something like, after taking your class, I have really enjoyed being reflective on my learning. And over the summer I was really reeling because I thought I was ready and I wasn't. But using that reflectivity, I'm gonna come back stronger next quarter. I have my ADHD coach, I have my diagnosis. I'm gonna be submitting all those steps that we had talked about when we work together, and I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna do better in that class.

And the reason that that's really powerful is that in that moment, that man was using the reflective habit as a mechanism to protect himself from being weeded out. And to me, that is a source of excellence because, and you said it earlier today, you used the word intention. Excellence comes from intention, and intention comes from within the student, and we have a bunch of science that says, when we as authority figures try to coerce intention, it doesn't work well. And that's one of the reasons that the grading thing is so harmful because what it does is it takes the students' eyes away from their own intention towards the desires of their teachers, often that are not well articulated.

And so for me, I don't have that tension for myself in my own practice, that somehow when I have a more holistic view of learning, one of the things that I love to do in this moment is I love to really help my students learn how to be better students. Because at some level, the content will never be enough. What is school if school was only about content and you could learn all the content you needed, then you wouldn't have to do any learning for the rest of your life. You could finish a class, check the box, and you'd be done. Right? And this is the great lie of education, that somehow people who are deemed experts can predict the future. And I always joke with my students, you know what's funny about you and the most famous Harvard scientist in the world? You both have the same amount of information on what's gonna happen tomorrow, right?

Like, no matter how much expertise, no one knows. That's the great lie. The great lie is that experts are experts and somehow they have some monopoly that the most highly trained brains in the world have no idea what's gonna happen tomorrow, just like you. And so what that means is that the future is unwritten. The moment we realize that future is unwritten, what that means is you could actually have an active part to play in writing what the future looks like and the moment we start to think you could have an active play in writing what the future looks like.

Well then what is expertise? For me, expertise is a mechanism to train learning. The one thing that I can guarantee for my students is they're gonna have to do new learning in the future. Yep. Right? That's it. So content expertise by itself is not the goal. The content is the weight. The goal is the habit of learning. And so for me, that's how I square that circle. That's how I get into it. Of course, that doesn't mean that I wanna send civil engineers into the world who build bridges that that collapse. So there's a whole other conversation to have about what it means to have qualifications and what it means to examine qualifications. What I'm saying though is at the undergraduate lower division level, where you have a general population with multiple interests. The problem of having a teacher assign exactly what content the student needs to do and then enforce that by basically punishment based ranking systems, to me, is a cheap answer to a way harder question. Right? And so that's, for me, that's how I square that circle. I think a lot about using content to help my students develop what I call excellent learning habits. And then I just believe that the students will figure it out they can really train themselves as deep learners. What's the likeliness that a first year student getting out of a calculus class is gonna then build the bridge?

Boz: Unless they're on the construction team they're not.

Jeff: Yeah, there's a long pathway between, and I think that those things must happen. You have to have minimum qualifications to go out in the world. But what ends up happening is we do work towards that end that actually limits the number of people that get down that pipeline. And what ends up happening is we end up weeding out the majority of our students. And my statement is, if I can really help my students advance themselves as learners, as they go on in the world, they will develop those competencies over a decade or two decades. In the structure of our education system, they'll have multiple opportunities to become the exact experts they want through the process of learning. So that's how I square that circle, that I look for evidence of that standing in a moment intending for fulfillment of a possibility and really that they're demonstrating those habits through the content itself.

And the moment that I've done that, I've done the best that I can, I can't then go back. And for me, at least, I cannot be an active participant in upholding elite structures because what I think what happens is so many students who could go on to do great things, I have now been a somebody who weeds those students out. Right. I've done the exact opposite of what I need to do as an instructor. So I pause, I'd love to hear what, what comes up for you as you listen to that.

Sharona: So much? Boz, do you wanna go first or do you want me to.

Boz: Well, I mean, it, it absolutely solidifies my being on the burn it all down camp. But as you were going through this and I just kept thinking about so many of the different grading policies and classroom policies that fit into that model that you were talking about.

A lot of those behavioral structures that are in a lot of grading and not just traditional grading, but that forced, okay, you're gonna do it this way. I want you spending so much time doing this, that that's limiting something else that they need to do. And that that's how we end up encouraging and enforcing that elite, because now I'm forcing you to be a student like I was. See success like I did, and again, this goes back, I have said it many, many times. I think I did it on one of the episodes where you and I were talking about the biggest reason it's so hard to change things in education is because it's led by the people that succeeded in the current model of it. And that's, that's always gonna be the case.

Sharona: Yeah. Well what's coming up for me right now is, Jeff, something you said, I think before we went on air, is that you like to be out there saying the really big things, because what Bosley and I do is we try to bring in the people that are a little more resistant. And so I look at what I do personally, just like my experience day to day right now is I am trying to make change in that undergraduate lower division level, but knowing that I am working in a 15 week semester and that my students are immediately gonna go on to another traditionally graded class.

So on the one hand, I don't wanna reinforce the power structures. On the other hand, I've done the data analysis on the classes that I am responsible for, not the ones that are alternatively graded. And we can see that there is some correlation of preparation to future success. And so I'm still grappling with, I agree with you, using expertise as a mechanism to train learning, while at the same time I need to have at least a core set of learning that happens in say, a pre-calculus, because they're immediately going to need those skills. And so how to balance these different things of I don't wanna be the reinforcer, and yet if I blow it up too much, I'm concerned about doing even more damage. Oh yeah. Because now they have a false sense of where to go next. And Yeah.

And also my students are coming from these dramatically different starting points. And no one has said to them, everyone is saying, yes, you can do this, you can do this, but no one has said, but it might take you longer because of the inequitable nature you've been treated to this point. Like at what point do we have a frank conversation with a student that says, you absolutely can become a doctor. The realistic thing is you're not gonna get through your undergraduate in four years. You are coming from a time and a place of too many deficits, at least the way the system is currently set up. You're gonna need extra time in your math classes. You're gonna need to slow the sequence down.

Boz: And no fault of the student. No fault of the student. And yet usually students that are in that situation also don't have the financial resources to be able to stretch that out those extra years or years.

Sharona: And it just breaks my heart because we're letting them into Cal State Los Angeles, which is a four year regional public, and they're coming in with these massive, I don't like to call them deficits, but they are not at the level that we expect them to be to be able to get through a STEM major in four years. Their math is not there the day they walk in the door.

Jeff: Sure.

Sharona: So at what point do we say to them, you should not be using your financial aid eligibility, which is limited to this amount to be paying for a Cal State LA Education at the moment. You should be going to community college, which is much cheaper, much freer, and you're gonna get an awesome education there and get that thing caught up and then come back because we lose them forever when we lose them at Cal State LA. This is a very hard conversation for me because I do feel trapped with the content piece of it. I can certainly add in the mathematical practices and the habits of mind and all the things that I try to do. And many of my students, let me, let me say this. 60% of my students who come in with these weak deficits are going to make it through my class to the next one. And most of them are gonna succeed, but 40% of them are not.

Jeff: Which is a lot. That's a 10, you know, out 10, that's four. Yeah.

Sharona: And yet it's a lot before when we used to have dev math or remediation, I had 10% that might make it through. So I'm still happy. The 60%, I just wish. So it's just hard. We are at time though. Boz, how do you wanna, do we wanna stop it here? What do we wanna do?

Boz: Yeah, we could go on all night about this and I really would like to go further with you, Jeff, talking about just some, like you were saying, that the artificial structures that we have in place, like what, Sharona was talking about, having to uphold these structures is causing the conflict, but then the fact that we're upholding it is this endless circle. I'd like to have a lot more conversation with you. But yeah, we are coming up on time, so I wanna thank you, Jeff. I always fun to talk to you. You're one of the probably handful of people that we talk to that really pushes where I am at and my own comfort level, which I absolutely love 'cause I love being challenged.

Jeff: I hope it comes with a feeling of love. Absolutely. And an invitation to keep building community. I guess, can I say one thing about the conference I forgot to mention at the end of that conference you all shared with me. I think it was 24 questions. I I love the concept of community and dialogue. I have a hard time traveling because I have young kids and traveling, it costs a lot. It's not easy for our family. And so it's harder for me to be in dialogue face-to-face. When my kids get older. I may change that strategy, but one of the ways that I'd love to be in dialogue with our community that was at the grading conference and attended my talk and shared those questions, is over the coming six months to a year, I actually plan to write pretty deep. I put a time block. And then within that time block, do the best that I can on those questions.

I will share that link with you in our email coordination and maybe you could put it in the show notes. And hopefully maybe when I'm done with that, I can earn another chance to come and speak with you again and talk about what it means to be done. But my hope is in that way that those that attended the ask questions that we can actually be an asynchronous dialogue so that I can address the questions that they had in a written space. And that's a project that I feel really strongly about, is something that I would like to wrap up as a mechanism to say thank you to those involved, and then to invite those others to realize this takes work. It's the same work we see Sharona doing in this dialogue. These are hard questions. This is not an easy thing, and it's a constant look inward, we're looking in the mirror, we're struggling. We have these debates that we play on. And my point is that that work is often unpaid, but it's the most important work that we do.

And I'll lead by example on that. So that's, that's the last thing that I'll say that I'm not done with the work that I wanted to do with that keynote. And just like you, sharona, I struggle hard, right? We, this is, each of us comes to it. And I think all we can do is the, is the best that we have on a daily basis. And, and I see you doing that continuously and I'm inspired by it. So thank you for that. And I. And I hope to continue on my end.

Boz: Well, we would absolutely love to share in multiple formats. Anything that you wanna share with that, any updates on those questions. And absolutely have you back to talk about those. And fact, don't have to wait until you get all the way done. You get a chunk done. Let us know 'cause Yeah, I think there were 24 or 26 questions on there, so yeah, good question. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. It's, it's been a blast. And for all of our listeners, you've been listening to the grading podcast with our special guest, Jeff Anderson, and we'll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website. www.thegradingpod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact Us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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