Life Vocations

By Bryan Stafford

I have a confession that probably should not come from a teacher. I do not like giving grades.

I have been teaching part-time for years now. I started as a substitute, moved into adjunct work, and these days I have something a little more structured. Two-plus colleges, a high school, and a stack of graded assignments tall enough to make me question my life choices. I love the teaching. The grading I could live without. And it is not the effort that bothers me. Effort is easy. It is what the grade is supposed to mean, and the quiet feeling that it often means the wrong thing.

That gap, between the part of the job I love and the part I dread, is what this whole piece is about. So let me start by being honest about why I am in a classroom at all.

I do not teach for the money. If money were the point, the hours would never pencil out. I teach because it makes me whole. When I walk into a room and get to share what I learned from a career of actually doing the work, something in me lights up. Yes, it is tiring. The nights run long, and writing a lecture that does not put people to sleep is its own kind of labor. But it gives me energy instead of draining it. I came to teaching because no one did it for me when I was young, and I wanted to be that person for someone else. In my own quiet way, I think of it as a calling. Reason enough to keep showing up.

But something has bothered me for a long time, and it took me years to name it.

A practitioner who teaches

Here is how I describe myself, and I mean it as a plain fact rather than false modesty. I am not a professional teacher. I am a practitioner who teaches.

That distinction matters. I did not come up through education programs and pedagogy theory. That world never excited me, and I will never be the teacher’s teacher. I came up with doing the work, making the mistakes, and learning the hard lessons the slow way, building real competence over many years and, I hope, a little wisdom along the way. What I carry into the room is not a textbook. It is a life of practice. That is my entire value to a student. It is also the root of my discomfort.

The discomfort is this. I do not care for grades, and I have never been at ease assigning them. Over the years, I have learned to do it better. I built rubrics, and they genuinely helped, so I keep them. I designed assignments that advance learning rather than just checking a box. A lot of my work is pass-or-fail, and it leans on application, the bigger picture, and reasoning [critical thinking] rather than on memorizing for a moment. I use reflection papers in which students tell me what they took away and how they might actually use it down the road. I set clear goals with each student, and we return to them all term. I have tried, in other words, to build a class that serves learning.

And still, one question will not leave me alone. What is actually best for the future of the people I teach? What builds real skill into true competence? What gives them genuine confidence in their own ability? What prepares them for the life that is coming?

I will be honest about my limits. Young students cannot fully appreciate what they need now in order to be ready later. That is not a knock on them. It is the nature of being young. And while I have a little more perspective, I am limited too. My past is not their path, and my world was not their world. On top of that, everything is changing faster than any of us can keep up with. So, I am trying to prepare people for a future none of us can see clearly, using a road map that may already be out of date.

Which leaves me with real tension. Do I lean on the metric that is traditional and easy to read, the test score, the clean number in the gradebook? Do I get harder-nosed, offer less grace, and care less about the messy progress of learning so I can point to a tidy instrument? Or do I keep my focus where my gut says it belongs, on the learning and the growth, even though that is harder to measure and harder to defend?

I sat in that tension for a long time. Then someone handed me the words.

The line that named it

A while back, Pastor Aaron Schultz of Immanuel Lutheran Church said something that landed exactly where I needed it. He was opening a lesson, and he mentioned a friend who somehow knew more Bible verses than he did. Schultz was the pastor. The friend was not. He wondered out loud how that could be.

His answer was the thing I had been reaching for without the words. As a pastor-in-training, he said, he had been studying for school. His friend had been studying for life.

Studying for school, or studying for life. That was it. The whole thing I had been chewing on for years, said in one clean line.

I will admit it fit my worldview, so maybe I was primed to hear it. But it did more than agree with me. It articulated what I believe in a way I never managed on my own. And the reason the distinction matters so much is that the two kinds of studying produce two very different people. One walks away with a grade. The other walks away with something they can use for the rest of their life.

So let me make the case for studying for life. I will be fair about it, because there are real reasons we lean on tests in the first place. But I want to come back, in the end, to where I started.

What the research says about cramming

Start with the most familiar ritual in all of school. The night before the test. The cramming. We have all done it, and most of us suspected even while we did it that we were not really learning. We were renting the information for a few hours.

It turns out the research agrees, and it is not close. One of the most established findings in the science of learning is the spacing effect. The simple version: if you spread your studying out over time, you remember far more in the long run than if you pack it into one frantic session. A massive review by Cepeda and colleagues pulled together hundreds of experiments and found the pattern holds again and again, with the advantage growing the longer you need to keep the material. More recent work by Mawson and colleagues looked at real classrooms instead of just labs and found the same thing, a robust edge for spaced learning over cramming.

Notice what that means. Cramming is almost perfectly designed for one purpose, to pass a test tomorrow and forget the material next week. It is studying for school in its purest form. If our assessments reward cramming, we are quietly training students to do the one thing the science says guarantees they will not keep what they learned. We are teaching them to rent when we want them to own.

The trouble with the test itself

There is a second problem, and it is the test as an event. For a lot of students, the high-stakes exam does not measure what they know. It measures how they perform under pressure on one particular morning.

Test anxiety is real, common, and has been studied for decades. A thirty-year review by von der Embse and colleagues found it consistently and negatively related to a wide range of outcomes, including standardized tests, entrance exams, and grade point average. Earlier work by Cassady and Johnson showed that students with more of the worried, racing-thoughts kind of anxiety scored lower on exam after exam. The number on the page did not tell the whole truth about what the student understood.

Here is the part I find most useful, though. Brady and colleagues dug into what actually does the damage, and it is not the pounding heart or the sweaty palms on their own. It is the worry. The interpretation. The story a student tells themselves about what that racing heart means. In their study, a short message from instructors that reframed exam nerves as normal, even helpful, actually improved performance for first-year students. In plain terms, a chunk of what a high-stakes test measures is not knowledge at all. It is a student’s relationship with pressure. That is worth knowing, and it is worth being honest about before we treat one exam score as the whole truth.

I want to be fair, because the picture is not one-sided. Not every study finds a strong link. Jerrim, looking at high-stakes exams in England, found little clear relationship once other factors were accounted for. The honest summary is that test anxiety hurts a lot of students some of the time, and hurts some students a great deal, even if it is not a universal law. But it harms many of the people I teach, and that is plenty of reason for me to take it seriously.

Tests are not the enemy

Now I must argue against myself, because the lazy version of this essay would pretend all testing is bad. It is not. And there is a finding here that genuinely complicated my thinking, so I want to give it real room.

There is a well-documented thing called the testing effect. The short version: the act of pulling information out of your own memory, which is exactly what a test forces you to do, strengthens that memory more than reading the material again. Roediger and Karpicke have spent years on this. Their work shows that retrieval practice, the effort of recalling something, often produces large gains in long-term retention compared to simply studying. In one striking study, Karpicke and Roediger found that repeated retrieval, not repeated reading, was the key to remembering.

So tests, used as practice, are among the best learning tools we have. That is real, and I am not going to wave it away. But look closely at the kind of testing the research praises. It is low stakes. It is frequent. It is repeated over time. It is testing for learning, not testing as a final verdict. What helps is the retrieval, not the high drama of one big, graded exam. Roediger’s work even found that retrieval practice helps people transfer what they learned to new situations, which is the whole point of studying for life. So the science does not tell me to stop testing. It tells me to change why and how I test. Use the quiz to build the skill, not just to rank the student.

Studying for life has a name too

If cramming for a high-stakes exam is studying for school, then studying for life has its own body of research. It goes by a couple of names. Two of the big ones are transfer of learning and authentic assessment.

Transfer is the ability to take what you learned in one context and apply it elsewhere, especially in the messy real world. That is the entire reason we educate anyone. Nobody wants a nurse who can pass the written exam but freezes at the bedside. Nobody wants an engineer who aced the quiz but cannot solve a problem that does not look exactly like the homework. Grant Wiggins, a major voice in assessment, put the uncomfortable truth bluntly. Traditional tests tend to reveal only whether a student can recognize, recall, or plug in what they learned out of context. They often do not tell you whether the student can actually do anything with it.

Authentic assessment is the answer that a lot of researchers point to. It means giving students tasks that look like the real work they will eventually do. Projects, cases, simulations, reflections, performances, the kind of thing they will face on the job. A systematic review by Sokhanvar and colleagues found that authentic assessment improves both the learning experience and the skills that make students employable, things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-confidence. A broader review by Vlachopoulos and colleagues reached a similar conclusion: that this kind of assessment builds the very skills the modern workplace keeps asking for. When I read that list, I realized those were exactly the things I had been trying to build through my pass-or-fail projects and my reflection papers. I just did not know the research had a name for it.

There is even a warning in the literature about what happens when we go the other way. When a system leans too heavily on high-stakes tests, the teaching itself narrows. Demir found that heavy high-stakes testing pushed teachers toward drilling multiple-choice questions and away from deeper teaching, squeezing out individual attention and the harder-to-measure lessons. A review of high-stakes final exams by French and colleagues went further, concluding that many of the supposed benefits of big final exams lack strong evidence, while the drawbacks are well documented. In other words, our heavy reliance on the traditional test is more habit and convenience than proof.

But we cannot just burn the gradebook

Here, I have to slow down and be honest about the other side, because I do not want to pretend this is simple. If it were simple, I would not have been stuck on it for years.

We need metrics. We need them to be clear, definable, objective, and repeatable. A grade is a promise to the outside world. When a student passes my class, an employer, another professor, or a licensing board is trusting that the grade means something real and that it would mean the same thing if a different instructor had taught the course. Learning that only lives in my head, in my private sense that a student really got it, is not fair to anyone. It cannot be checked. It cannot be repeated. It can be quietly shaped by my own bias without my even noticing. The rubric exists for a reason. The number exists for a reason. Objectivity protects the student as much as it constrains them.

There are other honest limits to studying for life, and I do not want to skip them. Not every student is ready for it. A self-directed, application-heavy, reflective approach asks a lot of a learner, and some students, especially early on, need more structure, clearer steps, and the simple motivation a graded deadline provides. Not every subject fits either. There are bodies of knowledge, in medicine, in safety, in the law, where you genuinely do need to know the facts cold, and a test is the right tool to confirm it. And the open-ended approach has its own pitfalls. Authentic projects are harder to grade consistently. They eat far more time. They can drift into vagueness if you are not careful. The same research that praises authentic assessment also repeatedly admits that it is labor-intensive and that many instructors are not trained to do it well. There is even a fairness problem hiding in here. Tasks that lean on real-world context can quietly favor students who already have that context, which is its own kind of bias that a clean exam sometimes avoids.

So, the answer is not to torch the gradebook. The honest answer is harder. It is to build assessments that are objective and repeatable enough to be fair, while still measuring what matters in life rather than just for Friday’s exam. That is the needle to thread. We need instruments that are clear and replicable but also informed by the real world and the actual culture our students are walking into. That is hard work. It is the work I have been fumbling toward with my rubrics and my goal-setting, trying to make the messy thing measurable without killing what made it worth measuring.

Where I have landed, for now

I do not have this fully solved, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. But the research helped me trust my gut, and Pastor Schultz gave me the language. So here is where I have landed.

The point of what I do is not the grade. The grade is a tool, and a necessary one, but it is not the point. The point is whether the person sitting in my classroom will walk out more capable, more confident, and more ready for life and the work ahead. The science backs this up. Cramming for a test builds knowledge that evaporates. Spreading learning out, practicing real retrieval, and tackling tasks that look like real life build knowledge that lasts and travels. Studying for school produces a transcript. Studying for life produces a person who can do something.

So I will keep my rubrics, because fairness matters and objectivity protects my students. I will keep some tests, because retrieval practice genuinely helps, and because some things you simply must know cold. But I will keep aiming the whole enterprise at life, not at the exam. I will keep building assignments that ask students to apply, to reflect, and to imagine how they will use this when I am long out of the picture. I will keep treating the gradebook as the floor and not the ceiling.

I came to teaching because no one did this for me, and because doing it makes me whole. That has not changed. What changed is that I finally have a clear way to say what I am after. I am not trying to get my students through school. I am trying to get them ready for life.

And if I have to choose, and most days I do, I will choose life every time.

The full academic paper this article is based on, including all citations and references, is available at the end of this blog entry.

The Full Paper

The complete academic paper behind this article, ”Studying for Life, Not for School” by Bryan Stafford, follows below, along with the full reference list. If you want the deeper dive and every source cited along the way, it is all here.

References

Brady, S. T., Hard, B. M., and Gross, J. J. (2017). Reappraising test anxiety increases academic performance of first year college students. Journal of Educational Psychology.

Cassady, J. C., and Johnson, R. E. (2002). Cognitive test anxiety and academic performance. Contemporary Educational Psychology.

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin.

Demir, C. G. (2021). The impact of high stakes testing on the teaching and learning processes of mathematics. Journal of Pedagogical Research.

French, S., Dickerson, A., and Mulder, R. A. (2023). A review of the benefits and drawbacks of high stakes final examinations in higher education. Higher Education.

Jerrim, J. (2022). Test anxiety: Is it associated with performance in high stakes examinations? Oxford Review of Education.

Karpicke, J. D., and Roediger, H. L. (2007). Repeated retrieval during learning is the key to long term retention. Journal of Memory and Language.

Mawson, R. D., and colleagues (2025). The distributed practice effect on classroom learning: A meta analytic review of applied research. Behavioral Sciences.

Roediger, H. L., and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The critical role of retrieval practice in long term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2010 review).

Sokhanvar, Z., Salehi, K., and Sokhanvar, F. (2021). Advantages of authentic assessment for improving the learning experience and employability skills of higher education students: A systematic literature review. Studies in Educational Evaluation.

Vlachopoulos, D., and colleagues (2024). A systematic literature review on authentic assessment in higher education. Studies in Educational Evaluation.

von der Embse, N., Jester, D., Roy, D., and Post, J. (2018). Test anxiety effects, predictors, and correlates: A 30 year meta analytic review. Journal of Affective Disorders.

Wiggins, G. (2020). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation.