911–920 of 925 posts
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I had a teacher the exact opposite. Completely ruthless about you doing the work, but patient and kind as long as it got done- And very pleasent.
That was my 8th & 9th grade Latin teacher. Failure was not an option. I can still decline nouns and demonstratives 50 years later.
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Having just shipped the kiddo into the real world, she's leaning liberal arts (her and her mom suck at math), but she has a benefit neither her mom or I had - EU deal citizenship. She's going to do a year here to figure things out - she's also been thinking about Europe. University in Europe, for undergrad, is different than the US. I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe…
No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.
When the kiddo was dealing with common core stuff, I threw up my hands ... the approach made no sense, but sold text books.
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The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal. My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years. I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me. Activist teachers are also a thing.
I'm not completely convinced that "ADHD" isn't just the natural state of kids who are bored most of the time.
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Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
professors who don't/can't cover their curriculum also get in trouble. if i had to dedicate half of my classes to reteaching things the students are required to know before taking my class, i would not cover what i am supposed to, which then has a knock-on effect to the classes that my class is a prereq for. whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to expla…
it seems to me this is a ratcheting effect. If a larger than average is discouraged, even implicitly by being called to a meeting, people will target under the average. Repeat this and you'll quickly find the average plummeting
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You mean like bending SNAP data to somehow fit your picture of what poor people are like?
Or making wild generalizations about how men in Oregon only work in farming and fishing when those industries actually only comprise less than 10% or the workforce. I don't think folk should bother debating with this user, I don't think they're conversing in good faith.
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I think the problems are deeper. The problems are at school level. The variance in the level of schooling in US is huge compared to Italy in my experience. This factor means that school exams are not a good indicator of competitiveness. Furthermore, the social systems in Italy mean that the failure is not that problematic especially for kids from poor backgrounds. And therefore, risk of depression etc was much lower.…
> The problems are at school level. Imho the problems are even deeper: they’re at culture level. But that’s where things get controversial, so i’ll hint at the problems and stop here.
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> Why? While it seems obvious that some students should be redirected to remedial classes, the evidence is that very few students made it past those courses. IOW, the obvious solution wasn't working. Being an engineer, my instinct would be to fix those classes so that they did work. However, legislators think at a different level and reasoned that the remedial classes constituted a false promise that costs students d…
I have been really puzzled by this situation and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night. I spent a long time chatting with an LLM and reading articles published by community college instructors and university faculty in California, and looking for examples in other states, the research (in California and other contexts) that examine the related problems with remedial courses. I've learned a lot,…
Meaning, the demographic distribution of students taking (and re-taking) the entrance exam is likely to not match the distribution of the state as a whole.
Rather than seeing this as a positive because it leads to the advancement of those who would be otherwise held back from high paying jobs, it will be denounced in coded language.
It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects, etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in breadth that raw abilities will shine more.
> It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA I think it's because socioeconomic status is much more correlated with tests (40% of variance explained) than grades ( https://cshe.berkeley.edu/news/family-background-accounts-40... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qeeeGJ4100oM-mK0g-1Z34VqEaF... I'm surprised the correlation between SES and grades is so low.