I’ve been playing poker with the same group of friends for over twenty years.  Early on, Boris, the founder and host of the games, came up with a way to display our attendance, which he named “the Honor Royale”.  He produced it with a flourish at the start of every game.  It included the date when each of us had started with the group, who were founding members, how many games we had made and which we had missed and, above all, our rank based on the percentage of games we had attended, calculated out to three decimal places.

Needless to say, we mocked him mercilessly at first for putting so much effort into so meaningless an exercise.  He had clearly put a of thought into the design of this thing, and all we wanted to do was play poker.

Of course, the joke was on us.  After a while, we began looking forward to the Honor Royale;  it took on its own meaning.  For years, when I was involved in local Gilbert and Sullivan productions, I would miss every October game and I would fall farther behind my arch-rival Craig, who had almost exactly the same rank as I.

Then Craig had a child and could no longer make our annual out-of-town game, while I, having quit G&S, surged ahead.  When his second child was born, his fate was sealed and I left him in the dust.

At one game, Boris announced his computer had died, and there was no Honor Royale that month.  The confusion and disappointment were real.  How could we tell our rank?  This pointless exercise had become meaningful for us.  We had forgotten how silly it was.

Now imagine you are a senior in high school.  You have had several dozen teachers over the years and, although they had had many styles of teaching and many different grading schemes, they have all communicated your grades in points.  They have given you points for learning something, or behaving in a certain way, and taken points away for not understanding something or behaving in a way they thought you shouldn’t.

Is there any chance that a young person who has spent most of his young life with this system relentlessly applied to every academic endeavor will not come to see points as deeply entwined wit the meaning of school?  It becomes the currency of learning, and not just for the student.  Many teachers I know have come to see the accumulation of points as a valuable exercise, a way to motivate students if nothing else.

“Good” students are the ones who are most successful at collecting points and therefore have the highest grade point average.  Like the Honor Royale, their GPAs are calculated out to three decimal places.  Only now, they know those three digits can have a powerful effect on their future.  The arbitrary and unreal has become deeply meaningful.

Imagine then the consternation in my students when I would remind them that in life outside school, there are no points.  (Yes, I know there are things like credit ratings, but it is possible, perhaps preferable to live without taking them all too seriously.)

Our discussion would often revolve around the notion that the skill of accumulating points is not one that prepares a person for life very well.  We should therefore turn our attention to those skills and that knowledge that will be useful in life after school, and make sure that however we do come up with a grade, it seems fair and flows directly from doing a good job of learning.