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To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
181–190 of 215 posts
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#182Somewhat 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…
Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear ag…
> And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing,
What does this actually mean?
My reading of it is- "as adults kids will be stressed, so don't try to keep them from being stressed when they're kids or else they won't be able to deal with stress later."
Fair?
If so, I have a modest proposal for you. Instead of providing the grades immediately, delay them by a random amount- weeks or months. Then, immediately notify both parent and child, at a random time of day. Perhaps weight it more heavily during mealtimes.
Additionally, grade a small fraction of assignments- say, 5%- as zeroes regardless of actual performance- this will ensure that academically gifted children, even those whose parents don't pressure them- are also stressed.
Since children are likely to outlive their parents, we should also randomly select some children, tell them their parents have died suddenly, and let them start to come to terms with that loss before it happens.
Finally, all shoes and socks must surely be banned, to ensure the proper development of calluses on children's feet.
Surely this will help make kids more resilient. Suffering is part of life, so children must suffer early and often or they'll be too weak.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm in high school right now and they have this system. They also had the same in middle school. There's no way this instant feedback system is mentally healthy. Also, a lot of times, teachers push a 0 as a placeholder grade and parents aren't in the classroom, so they see that and flip out. Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a…
But why send the grades (real or invented, it doesn’t matter) to students’ and parents’ phones? Who does that help? Does it help the students? Apparently not, because it looks like it makes them more anxious. Does it help the parents? It probably only helps those “tiger” moms and dads who are toxic anyway, I honestely think a parent shouldn’t care about the intrinsic details of his kids grades and day-to-day activity…
I think schools just wanted to hop on the latest technology and the easiest way for companies to push that was "instant feedback" or something. They didn't foresee the unintended mental health consequences.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#184Somewhat 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…
I went to a high school without public course grades. We’d get qualitative feedback often, and quantitative feedback on tests (eg 78/100) but it was never translated into a letter grade. It was great.
Letter grades were given at the end of the semester to the parents in a session with the teacher. Up to the parents if they shared that with their kids. Many didn’t.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#185>“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.
And they strike their children because they can't cope? If they can't cope without striking their children, well, then, maybe they shouldn't have any. That'd be best for their children, and for the parents also. The children won't grow up damaged (and having learned that this is the way to raise children) and the parents won't have to experience such pressure that they absolutely have to strike someone to make it better.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#186>“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…
Person 1: That miserable bastard shot 20 people.
Person 2: Oh man, the problem is *guns!*
Maybe the problem is people being driven to their breaking point, over and over again, by an increasingly brittle and rigid social order, to the point that psychotic plots are a highly visible statistical anomaly, that resonates with far too many people as a conclusion to draw from the circumstances they face.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#187Somewhat 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…
Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear ag…
I think it's worth reflecting on different attitudes to education. For a lot of parents and young people, education is perceived as a high-stakes, zero-sum game that determines whether you get to live a decent life. If you don't get the grades you need to proceed to the next level of that game, you're doomed to poverty, misery and hopelessness.
That perspective isn't particularly rational, but it's not entirely baseless either; if you come from a disadvantaged background, your statistical life prospects really are very poor if you don't get a decent credential. The difference between scraping a C and flunking a class might have a real and meaningful impact on the rest of your life.
I can fully understand why some people might experience a bad grade as "agonizing" or "horrible". If you don't have a great deal of confidence in your academic abilities or you have an underlying anxiety disorder, that notification on your phone might feel like confirmation that you're worthless and useless and completely doomed. It might feel like another dash of salt in an old and purulent psychic wound.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#188Somewhat 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…
Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear ag…
You’ve mostly been referencing physical ailments like a “crushed leg” or physical disease (in a subsequent reply). Most of this discussion is revolved around psychological ailments and psychological trauma. Which affect a significant number of people and their loved ones. I don’t think we should discount psychological health so much merely to contrast it against physical health.
Also, isn’t the physical world and your experience of a crushed leg a product of your brain?
Chronic stress and anxiety are also a product of the brain and in the physical world it ends up shortening your life span. It could be equally reasonable to say, “This bad grade is killing me.” - because with modern science we know there is possibly a literal truth to that.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#189Somewhat 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…
Huh, given all the answers here - I guess I might be different from the average, I never considered a different experience. At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I…
>Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?
I would like to hope that grades delivered in class also come with some modicum of qualitative assessment and psychosocial support. You might be giving Johnny a D grade, but you also tell him that he's making good progress and you know he'll do better next time if he keeps trying. You know that a B grade feels like a catastrophe to Anne, so you remind her that she's a good student and this is just a minor blip. John barely scraped a C, but for him that's a damned miracle and he deserves a resounding attaboy.
All too often, we in tech find a more efficient way of facilitating the core function, but we strip out vitally important secondary functions. Automating the process of grade delivery removes or substantially defers the opportunity for interaction between student and teacher at a critical psychological moment. The grading app doesn't know if a student is pleased with their grade or devastated. It can't see the pride in their smile, it can't see the hope drain out of their eyes. That simple human interaction is infinitely complex and vitally important, but we've reduced it to a couple of bytes of data.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm in high school right now and they have this system. They also had the same in middle school. There's no way this instant feedback system is mentally healthy. Also, a lot of times, teachers push a 0 as a placeholder grade and parents aren't in the classroom, so they see that and flip out. Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a…
But why send the grades (real or invented, it doesn’t matter) to students’ and parents’ phones? Who does that help? Does it help the students? Apparently not, because it looks like it makes them more anxious. Does it help the parents? It probably only helps those “tiger” moms and dads who are toxic anyway, I honestely think a parent shouldn’t care about the intrinsic details of his kids grades and day-to-day activity…
>how did we manage to screw this up?
I was a teacher last year and while I can't answer this question fully, I do know that it's a result of perverse incentives and group pressure.
Where I taught at school (a private English school in China) we also had an app that shows parents how their student is doing. They'd see test scores as soon as I uploaded the grades, and I'd get complaints from some of the parents if I was more than a day late in uploading those scores.
In the case of my school, we were competing with other private English schools. If we stopped or had never started using this app, we would get a few parents complaining "why can't I see my son's grade? [school z] does it, so I'm going to switch to their school!" We would lose some parents -- and for our student-retention team, losing too many parents means a pay for cut the following year. They would do anything to keep those parents so promises get made, and ultimately the school would certainly go back to using the app.
Meanwhile the group who built the app gets fabulously wealthy because they've built a (albeit harmful) service that their clients can't possibly get rid of.
Depressingly, the only way I see it turning back would be a force of equally-upset parents who removed their students from the school while asking "why do you use this at all? It's fostering anxiety and depression for my kid".
People vote with their wallets.