Ultimately, no matter your role, background, or viewpoint, I write this book as a dialogue between you and me. You come to this book with a set of expectations, skepticism, pressures, experiences, and hopes, as do I. This work of examining and reimagining grading is personal and interpersonal, so my tone in this book is more familiar than formal, more curious than prescriptive, more suggestive than demanding, more forgiving than accusatory. I do this not only to make the ideas in the book less threatening, but to model the stance that I’ve found most helpful when discussing these ideas.
— Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman (Page 10)
This is not only a false statement (a book cannot be a dialogue because a book or its author cannot respond to me in a bidirectional conversation), but it is patronising as well.
Leading up to this quote is a bunch of explanations about why it is "so hard" to talk about grading, which has not been my experience in schools. As much as I despise the practice of grading and applying any arbitrary measurement to "how much has this person learned," it is also easy for me to point to the fact that I have spent a lot of time in conversations with other teachers discussing grading, what policies to adapt, how to make it better, etc. Perhaps if Joe had spent more than three years as a teacher, more than a few years as a principle, and more than a few years as a district administrator... He might have experienced that.
Or he probably did but chose to ignore it... or spent all of his time sitting in a classroom alone, away from everyone else and not in the staff room. But I have never worked in a school where grading wasn't a central conversation at least twice every year (usually around the first week and any reporting period).
This doesn't mean those conversations were good or productive, but they did happen. Unlike his central thesis, people are not afraid to talk about grading.