An Olympic education | Kevin McMahon | TEDxBellarmineCollegePreparatory

Kevin speaks about the way that his experience as an Olympian helped him understand the ways in which our academic grading system is flawed. His comparison between the ever-evolving nature of technology and the unnecessary permanence of letter grades conveys that our modern conception of grades isn’t as modern as we thought.

A graduate of Bellarmine College Prep and Georgetown University, Kevin McMahon is a two-time Olympian and eleven-time US Championship medalist in the hammer throw. As a design educator, Kevin has taught at Bellarmine for 19 years and was selected as an Adobe Education Leader from 2006-2016. As a freelance designer, Kevin's work ranges from logo branding to animation to web design. His client list includes Stanford University, USA Track and Field, and Adobe. He has a rather alarming passion for Kung Fu moves.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

So when I was 15 years old,

I felt my first real life calling.

Thanks to a group of Olympic athletes

who were coaching kids for free
right here in San Jose,

I fell in love

with one of the most obscure
sports in the world:

the hammer throw.

Now, I imagine you're all familiar
with the shot put, the discus,

maybe even the javelin.

So here's the moment
you've all been waiting for:

Hammer Throwing 101.

Imagine you took a 16-pound bowling ball,

and you lodged a broomstick into it,

and then you spun it around so fast
that the ball went 60 mph,

and it built up centrifugal force

up to 500 lbs.

And then you let go
at just the right moment

so that it could fly higher
than an eight-story building

and nearly the length of a football field.

And that gives you some sense

of the unique difficulty
and appeal of hammer throwing.

But despite having the best
teachers in the world,

the first day did not go well.

In fact, I fell down.

Couldn't have done worse.

But I got back up,

took thousands of throws,

and got better over time.

So while I started at zero,

by the time I was a senior,

I had the farthest throw
for a high school student in the country;

earned a scholarship to Georgetown -

go, Hoyas! -

in 1996, I made my first Olympic team;

and eventually I threw 260 feet,

which is one of the farthest throws
in American history.

(Applause)

Thank you.

But to be honest with you,

the real benefits of that activity ...

were that it paid for my education,

it allowed me to see the world,

and it allowed me
to form lifelong relationships

with some very amazing people.

But as an educator these last 20 years,

I often wonder

what would have happened
to my Olympic dream

if I had been graded

in the same way that we grade
kids in the classroom.

Quick history of letter grading
in the United States.

Letter grading actually started in 1897

out in Mount Holyoke College,

where they decided to grade
their students' work from A through E.

Now, one year later,

they realized that E
was being confused with excellent.

(Laughter)

And that's where we get the F
that we all know and dread.

(Laughter)

So we're talking about
a 120-year-old way of assessing students.

Now, assessment is great.

I spent probably more time
watching video of hammer throwing

than I did actually throwing.

But letter grades present
a number of serious problems.

Number one:

Letter grades are unreasonably permanent.

So let's go back to my Olympic story.

On day one, I would have gotten an F.

By the end of the semester, probably a D.

Now, as a senior,
I was leading the country;

I'll take the A.

But all of this is going to be averaged.

And so I probably got
about a 2.5 GPA in hammer throwing.

And with a 2.5, colleges would say
I'm not ready for the next level,

and my Olympic dream would be over
almost before it began.

Now, you might be thinking, "OK. Well,
that's sports. Different from academia."

Well, let's check in with your typical
high school freshman.

Let's call him Doug.

So Doug,

for whatever completely rational reason,

he bombs his first biology test
his freshman year.

Maybe he has the flu.

Maybe something's going on at home.

But he starts off with an F.

He gets better over time.

By the end of the semester, Doug is
the best biology student in the class.

But it's all going to be averaged,

so Doug gets a C+,

and that C+, it's forever.

So Doug as a senior

could go on to do research

worthy of a Nobel Prize in Biology

but cannot get a 4.0.

And I want you to think
about Doug's situation.

How many of us, if we were in a footrace,

if you fell down at the start,

and you knew you had no chance
of winning or even placing well,

would get back and run all out?

That's really hard to do.

Or consider the role reversal.

I know hundreds of teachers,
and I don't think there's any one of them

who would want a grade
on their first year of teaching

that stuck to them
for the entirety of their career.

I know I wouldn't.

What we're missing out on is the do-over.

Everything that we do in life -

you know, our basic life skills -

we're terrible at them at the beginning.

From walking to talking to riding a bike,

we all get better
by a process of do-overs.

Or take design.

This is a Ted event after all.

The logo that everybody knows

because of the cool arrow
in the negative space,

the FedEx logo there,

famously went through 200 iterations
before they got to this version.

This was not 199 failures
and then a sudden success;

it was an evolution.

Or consider the paragons
of success that we admire:

Thomas Edison,

famously finding out 1000 ways
to not make a light bulb

before the light went on;

or Walt Disney,

whose first animation company
went bankrupt;

or Maya Angelou,

who endured one of the most difficult
childhoods you could possibly imagine

to come back and become one of the most
influential voices of the 20th century.

What do these people have in common?

It's not education.

It's not money.

It's not privilege. It's not talent.

It's resilience.

And when we don't allow for a do-over,
we don't build that trait

that is most in common for people
who have achieved great success.

Grades are stressful by nature.

If we talk about student stress,
we should listen to them

because what they tell us
is absolutely shocking.

In 2015,

the California Healthy Kids Survey

revealed that one out of three students
reported chronic sadness ...

depression.

And the year before,

the American Psychological Association

asked students: "What is
the leading cause of stress in your life?"

and identified school as number one.

And one in four said
it was causing them extreme stress.

And it's not just grade permanence
that causes this.

There's something inherent
about grades themselves.

I want you to imagine
the world's worst video game.

We're going to call it Level Down.

And in Level Down, you start off
with everything unlocked.

You've got all the super powers.
You've got all the gear.

But you only get worse over time.

Two things would happen
if you played Level Down:

you would lose interest very quickly,

and you would also focus
only on the things that could go wrong.

There's nothing to strive for.

And this is very much the situation
of high school students.

Even if our man Doug gets an A
on that first biology test,

he can only hold on or do worse.

And so he's basically
doing a tightrope walk,

and if he gets to the other end
of the semester with the A,

the chief emotion
he might experience is relief.

The chief emotion of learning and
bettering yourself should not be relief;

it should be joy.

Now, you might say,

"Well, OK, education:
serious stuff, it's not a game."

And I would beg to differ.

It's already a game.

It's just a really stressful
and oftentimes boring game.

And all the students
know the rules to this game.

Rule number one:

Find out what the teacher
really wants me to know.

Number two:

Cram the night before or during lunch
or in the car or during break.

Number three:

Spit out that answer
that that teacher wanted to know.

And repeat.

This is not a fun game.

It's a very stressful game.

And we need to change the rules.

Grades are counter-motivational.

What I mean by that is

they literally motivate traits
that we don't want to foster.

All right. We've got three paths here.

The one on the left takes three hours.

The one in the middle takes one hour.

The one on the right takes five hours.

If there's $100 at the end of this path,

which road are you going to take?

Students are not dumb.

They'll do the same thing.

This means taking the easiest classes,

the easiest teachers,
the least complex projects,

because the pay-off's the same,

and as a result,

what are we actually encouraging?

A minimized work ethic.

A conformity of knowledge:

Don't question the teacher;
it's only going to hurt your grade.

And most painfully of all, for me,

an actual avoidance of creativity.

Why would you come up with a solution

that's different than the A work
that the teacher provided as a sample?

I would point out

that these are the traits

that we look to for innovators in society:

people who are incredibly hardworking,

people who think differently,

and people who are creative.

Now, some might say,

"Well, it's kids these days.
They're just lazy."

But they're not.

Our man Doug, he'll work incredibly hard,

just after school,

whether it's doing a sport
or leveling up in a video game

or figuring out a skateboard trick

or figuring out some new, you know,
song on the guitar.

They will spend hours on this,

on learning.

What are we depriving them of in school

that they're getting after school?

Daniel Pink

wrote a groundbreaking book called Drive,

where he described that
what we really are motivated by

are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Essentially, we want the freedom
to choose what we're doing.

We want to figure out
things that are hard.

And we want to know that it matters,

either to our future
or to the benefit of the world.

In short, students want the freedom
to develop skills that actually matter.

Four:

Grades distract from
the actual goal of learning.

All right. This is Ernie Sheldon.

Ernie wanted to break
the seven-foot high jump record.

This was a big deal in the 1950s.

No one had ever done it.

It was kind of like the four-minute mile.

So Ernie was so fired up

that in his bedroom,
he put a tape mark at seven feet.

Fixated on that number.

Ernie jumped 6'11" dozens of times

but never jumped seven feet,

because he was so focused
on the end result

and not on the process
on actually how to jump better

that would give him the end result.

So if we replace that tape with the grade,

you can see the problem.

And there's some research to back this up.

Ruth Butler took three groups of kids

and said we're going to do
two academic tasks,

and, group number one,
we're going to grade you.

Group number two, we're
just going to give you comments.

Group number three,
we're going to do both.

Guess which group outperformed all others

in both performance academically
and in their interest in the projects.

Group number two.

In other words,

just knowing they were being graded

actually made them perform worse.

So knowing all this, why are we doing it?

Who do these grades actually serve?

The only answer I can
come up with is colleges.

They need to differentiate students.

I get it.

But consider the fact that two teachers
in the same department of the same school

might disagree on assessment.

Or the fact that schools
use different grading scales.

At one school, the same student
gets a 4.4, another one a 3.8.

Same student.

Or the fact that the letter grades
don't mean anything anymore.

There was a time that a C
literally meant a mathematical average.

I don't know a class in existence
right now where that's the case.

So what do we do?

I give you some what-ifs.

What if more colleges subscribed to
Freshman forgiveness?

So our state schools and our UC system
and some private schools do this.

But it should be standard.

What if colleges
focused more on portfolios:

what students designed,

what stories they told,

what research they've done,

and what have they written?

You're going to get a much more clear
picture of who that person actually is.

All right. Who can figure out
what these three students have in common?

They have the same GPA.

And that's crazy.

I propose that if there was a calculation
of slope that followed the GPA ...

something that gave us
a little bit of story,

a movement index

so we could understand:

Hey, student number two is excelling

and probably really ready for college.

He just had a rough start.

We should know that story,
and it's not that hard.

What can educators do?

We can gamify our classes.

Students can level up
instead of level down.

We can give them a sense of mastery.

So a student who's in calculus
really has mastered algebra first.

We can flip our classrooms.

We can provide resources
that students can access at home

so they're not so stressed.

We can have do-overs

so students' work can improve over time.

And lastly, we can link learning.

This is when you work with a professional

who's using the skills you're learning
in class in their professional life,

which gives it purpose.

For the last five years,

I've tried all of these,

and I can tell you they work.

My students are less stressed,

more engaged,

and producing better work.

So make no mistake:

there are alternatives
to traditional letter grading,

and in a world that is changing
more quickly than ever before

and facing unprecedented challenges,

we're going to rely
on education more than ever.

And after 120 years,

I hope you'll agree:

we're ready for an upgrade.

Thank you.

(Applause)