I don't understand why this would help at all. Is it better to be beaten in the middle of the week?
To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#52>“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…
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 the other hand, struggling with subject/object shouldn't prevent you from taking a turn at haiku.
So it would be helpful to have a decent graph of dependencies. But letting everybody progress along the graph of their proficiency would make instruction and administration very challenging. Especially when you throw in social aspects. Having a 10-year-old in the same welding class as the 17-year-olds could be problematic regardless of welding aptitude. And repeatedly putting a 17-year-old with the 12-year-olds studying geometry is also questionable.
But in the end, a grade should mean something useful. It should lead to some useful action that facilitates better education. If it does not, then it is only useful to signal potential employers. And that use is indeed dubious for 8-year-olds. But not so dubious for 18-year-olds who did not progress past their 8-year-old level of proficiency.
So I say grade everyone, then make the grades matter. If a 17-year old wants to take one more shot at geometry, let them. If they want to quit after the third try when they are 15-yo, let them. If they want to quit after the first try, let them. But once you quit, you can't move along the dependency graph for that subject.
Of course, "geometry" is much too broad. You could get stuck on one small concept. You take as much time as you need to go back over it again and again until you get it well enough to be able to study the next concept that depends upon it. This might take one hour or it might take 2 hours per day for 3 days. It doesn't have to set you back 15 weeks or half a school year.
But again, that level of individualized instruction is expensive.
Edit: spelling
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#53If my years of adolescent beatings for anything less than an A taught me anything, it was: don't bring report cards home on Friday and sign your own progress reports.
It taught me something else: deal with similar situations for my kids in a better way.
Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education:
1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime.
2. Pomodoro technique: just 10-15 minutes of assured focus to cover exam topics starting several weeks before the exam date.
3. Treat all grades with praise of hardwork! Because they did put in the time and effort. And briefly go over mistakes and skipped questions.
4. Treat the school curriculum as a secondary medium of instruction and push parental instruction as primary without speed limits.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#54I don't understand why this would help at all. Is it better to be beaten in the middle of the week?
From the article:
> "After comparing a year’s worth of verified child abuse cases to the dates elementary school report cards were issued, the researchers found a correlation between report cards and child abuse — but only when grades went home on a Friday."
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#55Another plea to change the behavior of the many because of the criminal actions of the few. Can we please go after the criminals and not remove a parenting tool from the law abiding?
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#56For me, it was quite the reverse problem - get perfect scores, have to sign them myself since parents couldn't be bothered. I would deliberately try to sign it as a completely different person to the point that at one time a teacher asked me if my dad was a doctor (he wasn't).
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#57Another plea to change the behavior of the many because of the criminal actions of the few. Can we please go after the criminals and not remove a parenting tool from the law abiding?
How would sending report cards home on a day other than Friday be removing a parenting tool?
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#58>“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…
The nuclear family is born in industrial modern society. In city in fact. Remember the one to be jailed - it takes a village.
No. Not sure in western society but in the old village (even to this day all those chinese has a village in their passport marked), you have a place where the punishment to be held.
Come on. Treating kid well is a modern concept. Whilst I think parent could be and should be lovely. It is not so in history and around the world. So is not your social environment.
If a minor deed like Friday the best no report card, please do.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#59If my years of adolescent beatings for anything less than an A taught me anything, it was: don't bring report cards home on Friday and sign your own progress reports.
It taught me something else: deal with similar situations for my kids in a better way. Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education: 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime. 2. Pomodoro technique: just 10-15 minutes of assured focus to cover exam topics starting several weeks before the exam date. 3. Treat all grades with praise of hardwork! Because they did put in the time and effort.…
Great points, especially #4 (reminds me of the "No Speed Limit" post from Sivers), but I wonder about #3. It was (maybe still is?) common for lazy nerds to bemoan "Why couldn't I have been praised for effort instead of smarts as a kid?" as if that was the major cause of their laziness. I've suspected that even if they were praised differently it still wouldn't have helped many such lazy nerds because the effort required would still have been very minimal up until they hit their limits where things weren't so easy anymore without working hard (AP classes, college, sometimes all the way to grad school). As far as the effects of praise can shape someone I've figured getting praised for something you didn't do is worse than being praised for a trait, even if being praised for something you did do is better than for a trait.
Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
#60Somewhat 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…
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…
this sounds terrible :(