"Failure is impossible for High School Students! (No Really!)" A news article about the grade system

[crazypsyko666]

Meh, grades are pointless until the last year of school anyway, and then only if you want to go do more study at a University.

If you are an idiot, you don't go to college. If you're smart, you go to a good college and get a good job.

Not always true. I got a great job and I never set foot in a Collage/Uni. I hated learning and study environments, so the last thing I wanted when I finished school was more school. There are many other ways to land a sweet job without more study.

Exactly. I can't speak for every school system, but mine was almost oppressive with its message of 'go to college or you'll just end up selling crack for the rest of your life'. On top of that, most of the teachers couldn't teach or had tenure (otherwise known as 'fuck this you can't fire me'.) and a terrible understanding of their student body.

I don't hate education, I hate the linearity of the system, and how those who cannot conform to it are shoved through the cracks. Passing school, going to college, getting in honors, it has nothing to do with intelligence. All it means (and I've had honors teachers admit this to me, if you're questioning my credibility) is that you're willing to waste your life feeding the machine. It's a shame, too. Because eventually I'll need a Masters degree or a PhD to do what I'm interested in. Whoop-de-doo.

Another core issue is that we are coddled too much as children, and are led to believe that we can do anything. This is not true. Everyone has the ability to do what they want, not everyone has the opportunity to. I'm not saying we have to slam harsh reality onto a toddler, but we shouldn't be pulling the wool over their eyes by blinding them with idealism. It's destructive.

 

[shticks]

No. Some people are simply not terribly bright.

To say that it is because they didn't try is to spit in their face.

WRONG! you have GOT to be kidding. You seriously think that telling them they didn't try is worse than telling them they are stupid?

It IS true that some people are smarter then others. But i don't care how dumb someone is it is ALOT easier to be told you failed because of something you didn't do as opposed to failing because of WHO YOU ARE.

here in my part of Canada. Highschools have given I's instead of F's until the years end. under the assumption that you haven't "failed" until all is said and done.

and it turns out that no matter what grades you get in highschool you can still lead a perfectly good life no matter what. Life is alot more than intelligence.

 

[Nouw]

They should really revise it then, because kids aren't loving pure-hearted people. It encourages the fact that they are 'incompetent' either leading to
a.depression or stress
b.laziness

Both bad and can be avoided. Obviously I think this is stupid, this is being implemented to help the lesser intelligent kids right? What about the deliberate fall outs huh? Some of those 'lesser' people are eventually going to keep getting that 'I' and become lazy.

We're all assuming here right?

 

[shticks]

That is still a matter of effort, not intelligence

No. Some people simply cannot learn as well as others. It has nothing to do with effort in their case.

Your argument would suggest we can all be heart surgeons, but we just don't try hard enough.

Why aren't you developing the cure for cancer or explaining black holes? Is it that you're not trying hard enough?

Sorry to pick on you.... but alas your elitist attitude on this subject rubs me the wrong way.

Case in point. My mom never finished high school as a teenager. And has been diagnosed with dyslexia. But here she is in her late 40's with a BA majoring in philosophy and extended minors in English and art history.

ALOT of it has to do with effort and commitment. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant.

 

[Nomanslander]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Americans are spoiled, fat, and dumb, I've been noticing this first hand all my life and can't wait to get the fuck out of dodge, so what else is new?
=P

 

[Angryman101]

Who cares, high school is what you make of it. If you are an idiot, you don't go to college. If you're smart, you go to a good college and get a good job.

What motivates you?

Hahaha, what an adorably naive thing to say.
OP: What a bunch of horseshit. Seriously, they keep lowering the standards every fucking year, and we as a nation keep on getting less and less intelligent. I guess people are content being just smart enough to run the machinery and do the paperwork while not being intelligent enough to question why they're getting fucked by the system they cling to so desperately. Sigh.

 

[thahat]

snip!

yes but, thats what learning IS. a chore.
okey, SOME things are naturally interesting to a person, and those things this person will gladly and automatically learn if given the means, the rest, is just so much more balony XD

also, linear system of grading, what, you mean like here in europa? 1-10grades with decimals 5.5 or higher =pass 10 for a perfect, 1 for a making it the bigest cockup in history

never did get why the americans use such a funny system, or even order of having schools XD

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

That is still a matter of effort, not intelligence

No. Some people simply cannot learn as well as others. It has nothing to do with effort in their case.

Your argument would suggest we can all be heart surgeons, but we just don't try hard enough.

Why aren't you developing the cure for cancer or explaining black holes? Is it that you're not trying hard enough?

Sorry to pick on you.... but alas your elitist attitude on this subject rubs me the wrong way.

Case in point. My mom never finished high school as a teenager. And has been diagnosed with dyslexia. But here she is in her late 40's with a BA majoring in philosophy and extended minors in English and art history.

ALOT of it has to do with effort and commitment. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant.

Yes -- a whole ton of accomplishment has to do with effort and commitment. But you cannot dismiss serious mental disorders that limit people's ability to learn straight-up "academic" information. To take school subjects, basically, and learn lots of declarative facts. Yes, a person who starts out behind the 8-ball can be successful. Yes, they can learn more than you'd expect. However -- not everyone is as lucky as your mom to have the faculties she did to learn what she did.

It's not elitism. Life doesn't subscribe to soft, fluffy notions that everyone can do everything if they just try hard enough. Some people will be star sports players, and others will try their entire lives and never make a dent in the sports world. Some people will go to CalTech and Harvard and MIT, and some people will be rejected because they just don't qualify. Some people will make billions of dollars in their rock band and some people will be stuck in the neighborhood club. No one will accomplish all of this in one lifetime.

All of these people are trying. Some of them will fail. That's how life works. I'm sorry.


On another note, someone mentioned something about deadlines and hating them. Sucks to be you and all -- jobs will have no mercy. Homeschooled students often have the hardest time adjusting to college in that many times they don't really understand deadlines, and then they start failing classes and not being able to finish stuff on time. College has no mercy. Jobs have no mercy. Since not everyone goes to college, high school should really drill into you that deadlines are serious business and you are not a special snowflake who gets to skip them. (I understand 'extensions,' life circumstances, yes, all that, but I mean just because you don't feel like working right now.)


On the subject of depression -- please don't blame depression on laziness or some lack of ability to deal with adversity. It is many times caused by a genuine chemical imbalance that occurs despite the best efforts of the patient, and that in some cases can only be treated with medication. Not all the time, but sometimes. You don't screw around with clinical depression -- when you do, people can die. They need help, not blame. Blaming them for their depression is just compounding the pain and continuing the stigma. As someone who knows a whole lot of people on medication who can't function optimally without it, I feel pretty seriously about this.

 

[Serenegoose]

Spoiler: Do schools kill creativity?

This is pretty much my opinion on the matter - found the talk profoundly illuminating. The attitude that schools currently have that failing is the worst thing you can do is ultimately destructive. This isn't saying we should coddle people who fail, but that by punishing failure, we make people risk averse. This, combined with the very directed, hierarchical nature of education, is ultimately damaging us. Changing an F to an I isn't going to change that. Schools are there as part of the process, along with parenting and other forms of life experience, of producing a functioning adult. When someone fails, this isn't the cue to abandon them, but to assist them so that next time they have better chances of succeeding, and so take another step along the path to being a well rounded individual.

 

[Whichi]

Who cares, high school is what you make of it. If you are an idiot, you don't go to college. If you're smart, you go to a good college and get a good job.

Going to college doesn't determine the success in your life. Imagine, if you would, a persin getting their Bachelor's degree in political science, only to spend the next 20 years of your life flipping burgers for Mcdonalds.... not exactly what a "smart" person had in mind, is it?

You make it sound as though college is something that you can be fickle with. It's not like you pick a subject, and waste more time with it than you would a relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend, only to determine that it's not for you and start over with a new subject and idea in mind. And it's not cheap, either... some cooking schools that I've been looking into are going to cost a pretty penny and a half.... and that's just the cookware

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

You make it sound as though college is something that you can be fickle with. It's not like you pick a subject, and waste more time with it than you would a relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend, only to determine that it's not for you and start over with a new subject and idea in mind.

...Oftentimes you really can change your major halfway through college and still graduate on time. You don't have to have Everything Worked Out by freshman year, or the end of freshman year. You can be fickle with college to a point. It's not the end of the world if you decide part way through that you really wanted to major in biology, not management, or whatever.

 

[RollForInitiative]

This will prepare students for real life, where failure is impossible and if you dont do something by the deadline then you can always do it later, when convenient for you [/sarcasm]
The whole idea wont work, the idea just encourages procrastination and makes students think that life is very forgiving and easy. So when they graduate they will not be able to handle real life.

My sentiments exactly. School should be preparing people for the real world, not trying to be everybody's buddy. A fistful of real life to the face is going to end most of the people in school under these systems.

 

[Acton Hank]

Who cares, high school is what you make of it. If you are an idiot, you don't go to college. If you're smart, you go to a good college and get a good job.

What motivates you?

Hahaha, what an adorably naive thing to say.
OP: What a bunch of horseshit. Seriously, they keep lowering the standards every fucking year, and we as a nation keep on getting less and less intelligent. I guess people are content being just smart enough to run the machinery and do the paperwork while not being intelligent enough to question why they're getting fucked by the system they cling to so desperately. Sigh.

I see that you've graduated from the George Carlin State University like myself here.
R.I.P. George

 

[thefrizzlefry]

My motivation for doing well in school is wanting to avoid giving my father more reasons to ***** at me. Whee. =/

 

[Dastardly]

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/momentsofmotherhood/failure-is-impossible-for-high-school-students-no-really-2410739/

Basically, this one school has decided to replace the "F" grade with the letter "I" for Incomplete. The reason why they did this is because they believe it can get students to "learn their lesson and catch up over the year." Naturally, there are people who oppose this new system and say it just coddles the students, making them believe that school and grades aren't a big deal.

The thing I'm confused about is the "I" grade supposedly convincing students to catch up. Isn't that what the "F" grade was basically designed for? From what I see, all you're doing is changing the letter of the absolute worst grade you can get, how is that going to change anything?

What do you guys think?

As a teacher myself, this kind of thing is unfortunately what most of the "higher-ups" spend their time thinking and talking about. It's run like a business, basically, because it's all businessmen running it. And a lot of times, businesses sit around and quibble about terminology. They'll have a three-hour meeting after which the result is that we decided to change "learning-disabled students" to "students with learning disabilities" in the handbook.

Basically, things like this are similar to someone standing in place flailing their arms about wildly--there's a whole lot of movement, but really there's absolutely not motion.

Where I WILL agree with certain changes in failing grades:

This 100-point grading scale really does need to go. Only 25 points of it are really acceptable. Another 6 are "barely passing." And the other 69 points? It's failing. It makes sense based on a percentage system--if someone is at least 70% proficient with something, that's enough for them to move on (just barely).

The problem is this--what good does it do for me, as a teacher, to give a child a 29? It doesn't matter than he earned it. Failing is failing. If you give the child a 29, that child basically goes, "Well, I now have no shot at pulling this up, now do I? Might as well just goof off since I'm failing by 41 points anyhow."

The way I do things in my class? If you get below a C on something, you are taking that test/quiz again. It'll be after school, or during break, or some other time that is inconvenient, but you have no choice. You take it until it's at least a C. This way, if a student gets a failing grade, it's obvious that they chose to have it. This is to cover my own butt.

But also, when I give a student a failing grade, I don't go below 60. Why? Because if and when that student decides to make a change and try to pull things together (which happens quite often), he'll actually have a shot at redemption. He's got to gain 10 points to make a 70 and get a pass. If he chooses not to, hey, a 60 is just as "failed" as a 29. I'm not misrepresenting his ability--he's failed, clearly.

So some of this policy change is useless terminology shuffling. Some of it is just allowing for the possibility of redemption, in those cases where students decide to turn things around. As I said, this happens more often than you'd think... it's just that sometimes the students are so far down numerically that no amount of effort can get them out of the hole. And then they give up again.

 

[Dastardly]

That is still a matter of effort, not intelligence

No. Some people simply cannot learn as well as others. It has nothing to do with effort in their case.

Your argument would suggest we can all be heart surgeons, but we just don't try hard enough.

Why aren't you developing the cure for cancer or explaining black holes? Is it that you're not trying hard enough?

Sorry to pick on you.... but alas your elitist attitude on this subject rubs me the wrong way.

Case in point. My mom never finished high school as a teenager. And has been diagnosed with dyslexia. But here she is in her late 40's with a BA majoring in philosophy and extended minors in English and art history.

ALOT of it has to do with effort and commitment. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant.

Okay. So go figure out the cure for cancer and AIDS.

Save a billion lives.

Then get started on traveling to Mars.

Intelligence, by and large, determines how fast and easily a person learns. It doesn't determine what they can learn, though. So yes, we could all be heart surgeons (or rather, we could all have the knowledge) if we "tried hard enough." But for plenty of people, it would basically take their whole lives to learn it, and they'd end up realizing that (for them) it's not worth the time, and they'll move on to something else.

Intelligence is just a measure of how quickly someone perceives and understands patterns, and how quickly that can absorb and use knowledge. It isn't a measure of knowledge, or how much knowledge a person can hold. Someone might have to take 11th grade four times, but they are capable of learning the content.

(In cases of severe mental retardation, the process is painfully slow, such that a person's lifespan might still not provide enough time to learn some of these things. There's also the language barrier, as they can have trouble understanding abstract concepts and groundwork that has to be laid first. But who's to say that, with infinite time and patience, you couldn't teach them the same stuff?)

 

[unicron44]

But school is stressful, and I think our growing focus on strict grading and standardized testing is frightening. People don't need constant threats of failure, not achieving, low test scores and people being disappointed in them to learn. People learn all of the time when they develop a love and passion for it, yet that's exactly what our public school system is taking out of learning: The fun, the passion and the exploration. They have turned learning into a chore, a job that needs to be done - or else you won't be successful.

I swear every other week I get some sort of lecture from a teacher that something is always going to screw you up. Also I cannot count on two hands the number of standardized tests I had to take in my high school career so far (I'm only a sophomore).

Each semester we take two standardized test with the fear if you do not do well in the test you will be placed in remedial classes. My school is set up that if you are at an adequate level of math you take Geometry your freshmen year, but if you are really good you take Algebra II. I was in Geometry and the whole standardized test is based Algebra II. Now you take this test four times in one year, so there are four math and four reading portions. That is eight in one year where if you screw up one of these tests it is remedial math or reading. (I'm not sure why I'm complaining about reading because you can pass the tests without the reading any of the text.)

I messed up one test so I was placed in remedial math so I had to retake this test, again. That is my nineth test in high school already. Then two weeks later I had to take another test so I'm at eleven combined. We have another coming up in a few weeks as well. This overuse of standardized test is bullshit. How come I am in a remedial class right now while I'm in Algebra II where I am taught all of the same things?