If you don't do the work, should you get credit for it? Most sensible people think not, including Lynden Dorval, the Edmonton physics teacher who created a furor by giving zeros to students who didn't hand in assignments.
And while Dorval is probably on the angels' side in this one - and supported overwhelmingly by public opinion - his sin was to keep handing out zeros in a school with a no-zero policy.
Don't laugh. Through some weirdly misguided perception of student psyches, there actually is a school of educational theory that believes zeros should be banished from grading since they are injurious to self-esteem and may encourage dropping out. Many schools and boards have bought into it.
According to a paper by Michael Zwaagstra, published in August for the non-profit Frontier Centre for Public Policy, the practice is widespread. The policy exists in localities across Canada - including places where even plagiarism, like missing work, is exempt from the dreaded zero. Apparently, cheaters can win.
Dorval was fired by his board last week (and subsequently offered a position in a private school), but his case raises challenging issues.
Was the man now dubbed "Mr. Zero" and the "Zero Hero" right? Probably. Thousands of people who have weighed in on the issue certainly think so. But what may be more interesting is that such policies even exist. And that most people haven't a clue they do.
That's the thing about wacky new educational theories. They're championed by credulous program developers and administrators who haven't been near a classroom in decades, and then, no matter how dopey they are, they're put into place. Most of the time, parents have no idea.
An absence of first-hand classroom knowledge is no deterrent, it seems, to imposing half-baked constraints on teachers and students already wrestling with the massive challenges of teaching and learning.
Long ago, far away and in a previous life, I was a high-school teacher for 18 years. I came from a family squarely rooted in the classroom, with grandfather, both parents, brother, sister-in-law and husband all having been teachers or principals. Chalk dust runs in my blood.
So when I hear education-related news - from teachers' labour difficulties to word that groundbreaking research may help correct deficits in disadvantaged kids - I react only partly as a parent and grandparent. The rest of my response is tempered, or enhanced, by my experience as a teacher.
In public education, there is much to be distressed by, much to cheer - and much about which to be suspicious. Teachers with even a nanosecond's experience know that skepticism is the healthiest response when the ministry, board or principal hands them a platter with a whole new educational approach on it.
My teaching generation may recall the chaos of the Classroom Without Walls. Or the excitement of Modular Scheduling, wherein you'd meet a class for 90 minutes (six 15-minute mods) one day, and one 15-minute mod the next - time enough to say hi and goodbye, with attendance-taking in between. At one of my schools, a vice-principal's obsession with long hair on boys, which he believed predicted failure, resulted in a short-hair rule. In the early '70s, that became more than a bit problematic.
But there is good news. Most experienced teachers can take all the harebrained notions educational officials throw at them, pay them minimal requisite lip service and get on quite well with the real business of helping kids learn. This they do through an alchemic combination of pedagogical expertise, patience, creativity and acquired wisdom - modular scheduling and open-classroom bedlam notwithstanding.
There's even good news from educational theorists, at least those like Zwaagstra, a public high school teacher, who actually understand the realities of the classroom. His Frontier Centre report sticks a neat pin into the pretensions of the latest newsworthy bit of educational kookiness.
No-zero policies, he writes, are largely unsupported by serious research; undermine teachers' discretion and methodology; and create false expectations in students, preparing them poorly for life after school.
At the beginning of this new school year, teachers are front and centre for all the wrong reasons. But let's wait before casting stones. Sometimes it's the educational tomfoolery behind the scenes that threatens to make classrooms truly dysfunctional.
Janice Kennedy is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.
