Every semester as a teacher, I go through a distinct honeymoon phase with a new crop of students:  for a few solid weeks, we feel downright decently about one another, until I have to go and harsh the mellow by assigning grades.  Like awards, we want grades to matter when they flatter, and be irrelevant when they don’t.  It’s a cheeky relativism that shows our love/hate relationship with feedback. Performance reviews of any kind tend to be over-burdened with meaning, not cause they’re so important, so much as cause they’re so infrequent.  Which is why, unless my sons are setting their desks on fire, I’m not super interested in report cards.

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