Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

Why have homework grades? Well, if you don't, "they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework."

Why have deadlines? If you don't, they "blame you for not imposing deadlines on them."

I get why someone would want to avoid blame or conflict, but it shouldn't influence what you're grading people on.

His reasoning for participation grades is bogus.

1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more slowly and cover less ground and questions would be better after class one on one.

2. He doesn't want kids to act up and is punishing the kids that do by removing their future opportunities, which is not great because the kids most likely to act up are the ones most likely to have learning difficulties or hard home lives. So this makes things worse for kids that need the most help.

3. Participation grades are arbitrary and a tool for control. The initial arguments for other grades about how they can't be arbitrary and you need to be rigid are thrown out the window with participation grades.

4. You don't really have a major freeloader problem in classes, in part because it's not a commons. It's managed and controlled by one person or an administration. It is my opinion that it is unnecessary to punish what freeloading exists, which is what participation grades do.

5. Participation grades are not really an incentive, they are a penalty. If you make participation worth something you are forcing people to participate if they want the same grade they would have previously gotten without participation. You are penalizing non-participation by lowering their grade. For it to be a pure incentive, they would need to get extra points or something for participation, but they don't.

“If they were right, I’d agree, But it’s them they know, not me.”

Reminds me of The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

But it's the other side of the coin

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

When I used to teach at college and university I would think "there's no way you are ever getting a job in this field" and then when I did professional corporate training I would think "I have no idea how you keep your job, but I do know that if I showed up for an interview, you wouldn't give me the time of day."

You can argue with "well maybe you're a lousy teacher" and whether that is true or not, it doesn't account for the flat out denial and debating, and dare I say it, outright lying, about why the assignment wasn't done.

I don't know, this kind of feels like the adult version of ice cream for breakfast.

Maybe what you're describing is the difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. There's nothing forcing any of us to watch a ton of streaming video other than our own choices, although it's hard to decide to go out and do something different once you're in that habit.