6 ms·

Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.

Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience. I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.

siliconc0w 5y ago
+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them. For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!). I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?
  - analog31 5y ago
    This is a good point, but it highlights the fact that classroom education is a compromise -- economic and social -- and not a moral standard. Thus I think we should at least be conscious of its limitations, even if we can't immediately do anything about them.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Sorry, I tried to be clear that that scenario is an unrealistic ideal. Ideal in the sense of a spherical frictionless student in a vacuum with infinite funding as well as ideal in the sense of good. In that case one solution would be more teachers than students. Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone. Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    It is hard! But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject. I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind. Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
  - Negitivefrags 5y ago
    I went to a tiny mixed age school and basically each kid worked on workbooks at their own pace. The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck. There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once. We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it. When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.
ipaddr 5y ago
Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  Well, now many are looking to ban the SAT as well.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor. For example those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities. Or those who had an article published in the news…etc. All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class. California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
    - dehrmann 5y ago
      > You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test. > those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems. > And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class. The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.
professoretc 5y ago
> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no > realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam > or missing a few assignments early in the semester. You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
- listless 5y ago
  I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards): D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard (standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.) That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different? I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC. Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time. I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning. I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private. All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs. If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
- dnndev 5y ago
  High school should completely be optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to simply make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC. But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial. Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
kpozin 5y ago
Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.
bsder 5y ago
> I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success. Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester". To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing? And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it. If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed. However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
jollybean 5y ago
It's not unreasonable. We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'. HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported. My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed. Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc.. The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book! Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative. So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C. This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself? So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time. In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago. The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated. There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
Bull... shit. We aren't even allowed to give students 0s anymore. 59 is the lowest we are allowed to give students which they literally play like a fiddle to their advantage. Schools, public and most charter, and the overall education system is so bad that it cannot be saved. Not only that but the complete default to cowardice of administrations not wanting to get sued by idiot parents, literally enables idiot parents to be worse idiots and get away with more and more things. EVERYTHING, is rigged against the teachers.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience. But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.

siliconc0w 5y ago

+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them. For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.

WalterBright 5y ago
Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!). I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.

jimbokun 5y ago
How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?
- analog31 5y ago
  This is a good point, but it highlights the fact that classroom education is a compromise -- economic and social -- and not a moral standard. Thus I think we should at least be conscious of its limitations, even if we can't immediately do anything about them.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Sorry, I tried to be clear that that scenario is an unrealistic ideal. Ideal in the sense of a spherical frictionless student in a vacuum with infinite funding as well as ideal in the sense of good. In that case one solution would be more teachers than students. Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone. Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  It is hard! But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject. I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind. Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  I went to a tiny mixed age school and basically each kid worked on workbooks at their own pace. The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck. There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once. We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it. When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.

ipaddr 5y ago

Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.

jimbokun 5y ago
Well, now many are looking to ban the SAT as well.
rcpt 5y ago
Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT
- bushbaba 5y ago
  You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor. For example those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities. Or those who had an article published in the news…etc. All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class. California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test. > those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems. > And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class. The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.

professoretc 5y ago

> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no > realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam > or missing a few assignments early in the semester. You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.

listless 5y ago
I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards): D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard (standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.) That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different? I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC. Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time. I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning. I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private. All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs. If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.

dnndev 5y ago
High school should completely be optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to simply make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
Aerroon 5y ago
>I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC. But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial. Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.

kpozin 5y ago

Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.

bsder 5y ago

> I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success. Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester". To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing? And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it. If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed. However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.

jollybean 5y ago

It's not unreasonable. We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'. HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported. My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed. Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc.. The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book! Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative. So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C. This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself? So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time. In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago. The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated. There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago

Bull... shit. We aren't even allowed to give students 0s anymore. 59 is the lowest we are allowed to give students which they literally play like a fiddle to their advantage. Schools, public and most charter, and the overall education system is so bad that it cannot be saved. Not only that but the complete default to cowardice of administrations not wanting to get sued by idiot parents, literally enables idiot parents to be worse idiots and get away with more and more things. EVERYTHING, is rigged against the teachers.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience. But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.