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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

#61

Post by Hello71 »

legionof7 wrote: post #7
seltzered_ wrote: post #2

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…

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…

wouldn't it make more sense to use 1 as a placeholder

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

#62

Post by freeopinion »

jacobolus wrote: post #34
Aloha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter grades are useless to gradeschoolers (K-5).

Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and la…

Our school district administers SBAC tests. Students are given a general score, but nothing specific. Nobody is allowed to know which questions a student was given, let alone which ones they got right or wrong. The tests are completely adaptive, so every student gets a different set of questions.

The school district uses cumulative results to assess students, teachers, and entire schools. But it's all meaningless. You don't know which areas a student struggles in. You don't know what topics a teacher doesn't explain well. You don't know where the specific holes are in a school's curriculum. You fire teachers, shuffle classes, and fund schools without useful information. There is no way to take a teacher and make them better. You can only replace them and hope for the best, shooting in the dark. You can make a student feel generally bad about themselves, or good about themselves, but not help them assess their specific strengths and weaknesses.

It all seems so pointless to me that I specifically pull my children out of testing days. If an entire day or three has no educational value, there's no point in attending.

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

#64

Post by solipsism »

geofft wrote: post #49
xupybd wrote: 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…

What kind of crazy leap of logic does it take to go from we can't assume everyone can be a good parent to nuclear families don't make sense?

There is a world of things society and government could do, beyond what is done today, to try to ensure the well-being of children -- everything from better education programs to drastic things like requiring parents to be licensed -- before one gets to the idea of dissolving the concept of families completely.

If logical arguments exist that supposedly support such an exotic and questionable idea, you should probably not leave it to the rest of us to guess at them.

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

#65

Post by amvalo »

miyhhbftdx wrote: post #53
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #42

If 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.…

> Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education:

> 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime

Also known as being a normal human being...

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

#67

Post by gizmo686 »

r00fus wrote: post #48
gizmo686 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that you mean having grades in grades K-8, and not that schooling should not start until 9th grade. I went to a K-12 school for high school (transferred in at grade 9); and they didn't give any grades in K-8 [0]. Having said that, I do not think the concept of grades for younger students is inherantly bad, it is just that parents and students are terrible at receiving them. I assume you do see the value in r…

Wow I had no idea K-12s still existed. What was the profile / location of your school?

Private school in Maryland; about 50 students/grade in K-8 and 80 in 9-12

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

#69

Post by gre »

legionof7 wrote: post #7
seltzered_ wrote: post #2

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…

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…

Opt out

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

#70

Post by yogeshlor »

Hello71 wrote: post #61
legionof7 wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

wouldn't it make more sense to use 1 as a placeholder

how about hyphen -
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