Teaching and learning has always been subjective

“It seems easier to far too many teachers to imagine that students do work the way machines do — that they can be scored according to objective metrics and neatly compared to one another. Schools, and the systems we’ve invented to support them, condition us to believe that there are always others (objective experts or even algorithms) who can know better than us the value of our own work. I’m struck by the number of institutions that for all intents and purposes equate teaching with grading — that assume our job as teachers is to merely separate the wheat from the chaff. And I find myself truly confused when anyone suggests to me that there is a way for us to do this kind of work objectively. For me, teaching and learning have always been (and will always be) deeply subjective.”