People Twitter

I sympathize with this.

As a kid, I'd do the homework, put it in my backpack (thanks to my Mom), yet I'd completely forget to turn it in, despite the whole class getting up to do it, and get a 0%. Turning it in later for ~50% (thanks to sympathetic and confused teachers) saved my butt.

...And yes, I'm definitely neurodivergent.

Problem is that the school-to-prison pipeline is a very real thing and kids that are held back or don't finish school are far more likely to end up in prison than those that finish. The way school systems work in most of the US, the differences in outcomes for those with and without a high school diploma are stark and depressing. Finishing is as important as the education itself.

Read: End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale

Tbf it's true. Grades should not be a tool to hold anyone down, in fact there's very little value in grading - it's just a patch for incompetent education.

I had a math teacher that would assign 100+ long division problems every night and then give you a 0 if you skipped more than 3 of them.

That is unironically how donald passed.

The purpose of a class is to instill a specific set of knowledge and skills.

The purpose of an assignment is to provide the student with sufficient pressure to study the expected knowledge, and practice the expected skills. The assignment is the pressure to learn; it is not evidence of learning.

To the student who has achieved mastery of that knowledge and skillset prior to completing the class, an assignment has no valid purpose. For such a student, the assignment is busywork, and serves only to distract the student from further study.

If your grading style does not allow for a student to demonstrate mastery and refuse busywork assignments, your grading is a problem.

A student with test scores equal or better than the class average does not deserve to fail your class for having refused assignments.

A student who ritualistically completes all of their homework assignments with excellent marks, but is entirely unable to pass a test on the subject matter, is a student who has failed your class.

Grades have always been meaningless.

People who believe in meritocracy and all that bullshit are just too privileged to notice.

edit: I didn't even realize this was "white people twitter" but makes sense 100%.

The first problem is that we're conflating Executive function with Knowledge.

If you get a 50 because you didn't understand the material, that's different from not doing or turning in the work.

I'm dealing with this now. The kid turns in his work, gets A's and B's, takes his test, and gets A's. His actual work in school is all A's, B's and 0's

He's learning, he knows the material. He can't hold focus, loses the paper, gets embarrassed if it gets a wrinkle, doesn't turn it in, and won't keep an organized folder.

He gets behind enough that he starts staying up late to finish the work and ends up falling asleep in class. We mediate with the teachers, stand over him to get him to do the work. Try to get him to keep it up once he's out of our sight. We get back on even keel again 2 weeks later, and some teacher who's behind on their grading does batch grading a week before the end of the semester, and we have 10 more assignments that weren't listed in the portal the day before.

Some of his teachers will take a late paper and give him a 50 on it. That's a huge advantage because coming from a 0 is hard.

And in before someone bitches at me that you can't not turn in work in real live, yeah, I know what's why we go to school and that's why we're working on it. Doctors, counselors, teachers, and parents.

Actual conversation I had with an admin after I graded ab exam with 70/100 after a student made 2 big and 2 small mistakes on an exam

You have to grade her exam 100

But she made a bunch of mistakes

She wants the grading 100 or she'll leave

But then what is the point of grading?

The grading doesn't matter, of they pay, they get each grade 100/100

I was placed in the remedial track and when I tried to get out, they tried everything to keep me in them. From telling me to wait a week to reconsider, only to miss the change class deadline, to gas lighting me into fearing failure, to telling me that the classes were full. I recently found out that they lied to me about my honor's placement test to keep me in the remedial classes. I hated my experience with that school so much.

Can I have 50% of my salary for doing 0% of my work?

Had a test graded on a curve in college. Actual score divided by two then add fifty. There were absolutely people that got a fifty. You’d think by dumb luck you’d get at least one right. It was multiple choice.

Speaking of disservice to kids in school, I recently learned about the "Three-Cuing" system and how it is basically making kids less literate by having them simply guess the meaning of things they don't understand instead of teaching how to read context, subtext, and use critical thinking skills or basic phonics.. It kinda pissed me off. Especislly since I had already been noticing a trend of young people online putting words into others' mouths or defining words wildly differently than the norm and misunderstanding the entire thing they just read.

So if you didn't study and you're confident you'll get less than 50%, it's better to not show up at all than to attempt the test?

Yeah. Massive societal and environmental issues behind that reductionist meme. Poverty, food quality, parent(s), neurodivergence, and even the simple fact that some people are shitty students but might excel at a job despite poor grades.

When I was a kid they just forced you through eventually because no about of education could offset the damage done be breathing in leaded gasoline exhaust.

This is by design. MAGA wants kids to be stupid, only stupid people vote MAGA.

"I love the poorly educated" DJT

Your IGN score is a 7, you see the game has many flaws. Your IGN scors is also a 7, your game is well made and optimised, with great plot elements and good graphics.

This would've been a godsend to me tbh. I was really bad about completing buzywork homework assignments but I paid attention in class and already understood the material. In high school I'd ace every test and wind up with a C or worse because of the number of missing assignments, it wasn't even intentional, I just frequently forgot about them because they weren't interesting and probably because of some kind of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Of course, there are also kids who might struggle to complete assignments due to complicated home lives.

I don't think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless. A 50 is still going to hurt you, it just doesn't drag your grade into oblivion. If a student gets 100 on three assignments and misses a fourth, is a grade of 75 really the most accurate representation of how well they understand the material? Counting the incomplete as a 50 would make that an 87.

Sprinkling in zeros can really drag your grade down and can make it feel like your grade doesn't really have much to do with your understanding of the material, and has more to do with being willing and able to work outside of school hours (or to just copy down answers from a friend five minutes before class, which I also didn't do).

Fixing Education

Doubt

After following a friend who joined XHS after the initial tiktok ban a year or so ago, I started to notice this trend of Chinese people calling American education "happy education" and I bristled a bit because I didn't find it all that happy. But as I see more and more people point out things like this, how the No Child Left Behind policy was implemented, how resources are diverted away from actually educating children... I kinda get it.

To be fair, I think the Chinese also have a biased lens here since their school days are like twelve hours long, I'm sure 7 AM to 3 PM seems more like daycare in comparison. But I think there's some truth in the mockery.

This doesn't apply to doctoral programs which really just seem like abuse and trauma factories. I don't know a single happy, well adjusted doctor.

I grew up in an era when they didn't pass kids to get rid of them. This is why I had a friend in the 8th grade who had two kids.

COVID fucked up my kids education so badly they are still trying to catch up. They were in 3rd and 4th grade in 2020, so they lost those prime reading comprehension lessons. But at the same time the schools failed to catch the students up and now they are struggling and instead of helping them they just push them along and pass the buck to the next grade.