191–200 of 359 posts
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Sure, but are you really arguing that getting bad grades is a good way to learn how to deal with anxiety? Do you have evidence for that statement?
The grading holds you accountable, and places pressure to do better.
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How on earth do we de-escalate from here? I feel that in the US it is impossible to summon the political willpower to make it HARDER to graduate HS or go to college, even if these things would make society better off. My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.
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That is like saying that the Space Shuttle worked.
It was certainly able to reach the orbit, but the loss of life was politicaly unpalatable, the technology was much more expensive to build and operate than promised and the supply chain was one huge boondoggle covering the entire USA so that every Senator would be happy.
At the end of the day, more efficient rockets like Falcon 9 just work better and the only attempt to resurrect a project organizationally similar to the Space Shuttle - SLS - looks corrupt and foolish at the same time.
Back to public schools. If I look at the international comparisons, American public education burns through a lot of money for mediocre results. This is your money; you should be more critical. Why isn't there any Silicon Valley for education?
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Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing? Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong? Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"? You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough…
> Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Are you really that self centered that you think that people around the globe care.
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It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.
At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems). I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a he…
Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn.
> I wouldn't assess based on them
I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?
> Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace. Teach students that they are entitled to…
you got to understand where this new guidelines are coming from. If a 5 years old student already can do algebra and calculus but his teacher give him 100 page of simple addition to do as homework and he decide to not do them… Should he fail the class ? I don’t think so, the class is already too easy for him! His grade should only be based on his score on exams! Why force student to waste hours at home doing busy wor…
It's a lose-lose.
> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later. > eliminate zeroes in grade books Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests. > and re-do tests Once you know what is o…
Redoing tests is actually amazing! Worst case is that you learn the same amount and best case you really get a good understanding of the material! I’ve had two classes with test redos and I always learn more with them!
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Sure, but are you really arguing that getting bad grades is a good way to learn how to deal with anxiety? Do you have evidence for that statement?
If you were starting from scratch and looking for a way to teach people to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines, what would you do? Setting up a realistic, consequential-feeling but ultimately not too consequential, environment with stress/anxiety/deadlines where they would practice and learn seems like the common-sense way to do it to me. Even if you had specific things to teach (coping techniques etc.), you'd probabl…
But fortunately I'm not starting out from scratch. People have made those experiments already. Grades suck.
Among other things that do work, guided retrospectives are one idea I would be tempted to implement. (Hell, we software developers know that too: when we want to get better, we hold retrospectives, we don't ask the scrum master to assign a letter grade!)
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The point still stands. School doesn't teach you to handle stress and anxiety. It just creates some for you.
It's a relatively low-stakes environment (in the long term, even though it doesn't feel like it at the time) where you have to deal with it. That's valuable.
Thanks to people like him the education in US will fall even deeper.
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How is this penalizing well-off students? By making it harder to automatically get ahead in education just because your poor classmates are sliding off the slippery slope of a negative feedback loop? I wouldn't call it penalizing.
This is actually a fun thing to talk about, but an HN thread is insufficient. There are schools and countries out there who focus more on excellence and cater to the top students. They put a ton of effort and praise on the top % with contests, a dense curriculum. I think most of eastern Europe, possibly Russia and likely a lot of other places fall into this category. On the other side, you have places like Scandinavi…
This school takes really deprived kids and gives them a great education. But it gets a lot of grief.
Edit it's an old article I believe they now have ex students attending Oxford and Cambridge.