ON GRADING: The Parable of the PEZ Dispenser

On Grading:
The Parable of the PEZ Dispenser

A young woman with good grades approached Damascus Dancings, to test him. “Teacher,” she addressed him, “you have said that your students shall receive new grades, which have not before been graded, such as the grade of ‘unicorn+.’ All my life have I applied myself to study and to virtue, in order that I might receive a grade of ‘A’ and ‘A+.’ Such grades have I received—to overflowing—and yet I am dissatisfied.

Tell me, what must a righteous student do, to receive a grade of ‘unicorn+’?”

Damascus Dancings replied, and said, You have said, “I would do anything, for a grade of ‘unicorn+,’” and freely do I award you a grade of 'unicorn+++.' But in the silences of your heart are you troubled: “Now that I have received a grade of ‘unicorn+++,’ the only place left to go is down. Down is the only place left to go, after receiving a grade such as this.”

Assuredly, I say to you, you must shatter the stone tablet of ‘unicorn+,’ and all dead grades of all stone tablets, which have become a heavy stone—and you in the river—to travel the tractless steppes of new value, and invent new grades, and inscribe them on stone tablets, and award them to your own self.
 
‘Banana-rama ©%,’ is a grade you could give yourself, if you dared to smash the stone tablets; and then your down-going would be your going-over, and in the selfsame movement would you sink and rise. Therefore I give you a grade of ‘banana-rama+,’ I give you a grade of ‘™%,’ I give you a grade which is a smashing of grades, its own down-going and going-over.

For I have not come for the dispensing of grades, but in order to dispense with grades.

Go then. Shall I dispense a grade? I shall not dispense a grade.

Shall I tilt back my head, and become a dispenser of ‘pezcore%’?
 
God forbid.

It would be better for you to receive a grade of ‘Banana D-,’ and become sick with receiving, and thereby bruised, and learn to hate the stone of grading, than that you should receive a grade of ‘pezcore%’ from me, and be therein satisfied, and say to your self, “Pezcore% is become a measure of value, overturning all prior values, and establishing itself in the plastic neck of history, a dispenser to end all dispensers, until the end of time.”
 
Go then.

Better that you should award Damascus Dancings himself a grade of ‘Banana D-%,’ or ‘Ugly Triple Pudding-,’ and thereby remember the grader within you—that you and every other is an inscriber of stone tablets, and a dispenser of ‘pezcore%,’ and that neither grade, nor value, nor ‘™spaceship++%,’ contains within itself any candy, but the dispenser of candy has within itself candy, the same who assents and denies.

Go now, and be you a dispenser of ‘unicorn+,’ and new grades, which have not before been graded.

Thus spoke whatshisname, Damascus Dancings, and the academics were filled with wonder, and mutterings, for he spoke as one with authority.