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To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

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Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#143
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is absolutely insane? The existence of "corporal punishment" or "physical abuse"? According to the quoted sentence ("prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse"), corporal punishment is not the same as abuse. The article also says: "Corporal punishment may include pain but is not supposed to result in injury; corporal punishment resulting in injury is physical abuse." So the line is whether the…

Yeah. What about punishment resulting in emotional injury? All that corporal punishment teaches is that it's OK for the powerful to punish the weak.

The weak clearly can't punish the powerful. If the powerful can't punish the weak, there is no check against criminal activity.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#144
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is strange that the study does not report raw numbers of instance. How many happened after post card release vs. not after post card release? I can't find the raw numbers of such. Only raw number of breaking down by race. Also, "Of the 167906 calls to the child abuse hotline for children aged 5 to 11 years, 2017 (6.7%) were verified as physical abuse cases". Only 6.7% verified???

I wonder if it could just be that the child abuse workers can more easily verify cases over the weekends. Maybe they need to talk to parents (who are likely working other days) before they can mark it as verified?

This is such an obvious explanation that it makes me doubt the whole study.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#145
post #49
post #9

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…

> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. I think that's starting from a mistaken premise. Why expect parents to cope? Parenting takes an amount of empathy and patience and care that many people simply do not have and will not have. In pre-modern society the nuclear family made sense, but at what point do we say, being someone's bio…

If parents aren't expected to cope (with appropriate support), life is a lost cause.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#146
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is som…

I think it is a shame to give a student a D or F in some building-block subject, then pass them on to the next level. There should be two grades: "ready for the next step" and "not ready". If a student struggles identifying nouns and verbs, it's probably not useful to push them on to prepositions or all the forms of participles. If you haven't memorized times tables up to 5x5, moving on to 12x12 might not be wise. On…

It is expensive but not doing it seems expensive as well, just not in the education budget.

One of the promises of IT in the classroom was to help with these sort of problems but it doesn't seem to have delivered.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#147

Somewhat related, there was another article this week that mentioned kids (and parents) now get notifications sent over the phone of their grades: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/10/18174263/anxiety-... “As the retreat group started to tell me more about why they felt such a collective sense of stress and pressure, a few major themes emerged. All of them said they voluntarily get their grades pushed to their…

But you can disable notifications for the app on the OS level, right?

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#148
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is som…

1. Grades are a strong motivator for many students. 2. Grades help you gauge how well you did, which can be useful for self-improvement. 3. Grades in early years can help train you to gain the study habits to get good grades in later years. Suddenly being expected to study in grade 9 might be harder. In my university we were allowed to take some classes pass/fail instead of graded. I can tell you exactly how much eff…

Is it grades specifically that mattered? If the consequence for not learning algebra was to repeat lessons until you learned it, wouldn't you get bored and want to score well and move on? Isn't level of progress as motivating as a grade in terms of competitive motivation?

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that's all that much better. As soon as you get the notification you're not going to be able to think of much else until you check.

Sure, but I see it as similar to the teacher giving you your test back: you get time to talk to your friends, prepare yourself, whatever before you actually see your grade (rather than it just popping up on your screen). In both, you do eventually have to see your grade, and you're not going to be thinking of much else while the teacher is going around passing out the test. Of course, I hadn't considered viewpoint wh…

One is during a specific time at school, one is not. That's a huge difference.
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