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.
Grades are for administration, not students. Students would receive far better education if schooling was focused on them learning and thinking and developing important skills. But after the industrial revolution, schools were designed solely as thought terminating obedience teaching places
That is unironically how donald passed.
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.
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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.
I’m dealing with this exact situation with my oldest son who has ADHD. He scores great on tests and most assignments but the 0’s kill him. Now that he’s a freshman they are being even more strict about the busy work. He’s getting better but still at risk of not getting credit for one class this year because of a terrible first quarter that he’s having trouble clawing out of even after having a B and A in the following quarters. It was really hard getting him to turn things in regularly and it has nothing to do with him knowing the material, they just give so much damn work outside of school that it overwhelms him and I feel like nobody actually gives a shit about how different his brain works. It’s not like he doesn’t care, the way they deal with it doesn’t accomplish anything besides making him feel worthless and then I have to put in extra duty to combat that along with helping him be successful in ways that work for him. This ignorant meme or tweet or whatever was triggering for me and I was so happy to see your comment as one of the first ones ❤️
Good luck! You sound like an awesome, caring parent just from that.
Let me emphasize this is just my open thought and not a criticism, but in hindsight, what I’d wish I’d done in school is set more reminders.
Post-it notes? Bracelets? Phone alarms, more sophisticated apps? Maybe something auditory if that’s more his thing? Basically I wish I had set up some more structured notification system to beat me in the head. Of course, as a kid, I hated excessive structure, but that’s exactly why I needed it. And it gets more and more needed later in school.
And these days, there seem to be some excellent apps/systems for helping.
It’s not just forgetfulness or procrastination though, like people stereotype with ADD. Sometimes it’s just being “overwhelmed” that leads to a bunch of zeros. This is hard to deal with, and yeah, the “busywork” parts of school don’t help at all.
Thank you! That is exactly the kind of stuff we have worked on, post it’s in his pocket specifically have helped a lot. They were trying to force things at the school that was counter productive for him, like docking him points if he didn’t write all his assignments down in a daily planner and other nonsense that did nothing other than increase his mental load and anxiety. Fortunately he’s really been able to start turning a corner as we’ve worked on coping skills over the years and he knows I’m willing to go to bat for him when the school tries pushing things that make things more challenging for him. It’s like they want a school of little compliant robots rather than taking the time to get to know how the individual kids can be successful. I also realize a lot of that is due to under funding, lack of resources, and checkboxes for federal funding so I don’t blame anyone but all I can do is vote and advocate for my kids.
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’s horrible. Especially since I guarantee you and everyone else in that class had it down after the first 50 problems.
It astounds me how many teachers honestly think that teaching/learning is about drills, rote memorization, and slavishly grinding away to get results. While I have no doubt that some people absolutely need to do this in order to get things to stick, I think it under-estimates the intelligence of most kids in the classroom. I would argue it’s not exactly learning and more like programming.
For instance, I can recall “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” like some kind of Manchurian Candidate sleeper-agent. But that tells me nothing about how that organelle metabolizes ATP to fuel other activities, what happens when it breaks down, and so on. Memorization and drills are great for algorithms, formulas, and basic foundational things. But the real learning happens in other ways.
Yeah, my test scores were good, not perfect because I lost a lot of points due to penmanship, but good. More than enough to demonstrate that I understood the material. My grades were bad from not doing the homework. I had 2 study periods every day and whatever I couldn’t get done in that time wasn’t getting done. I didn’t care, I had better things to do after school. Having more than 2 hours of homework a day is totally unreasonable.
I ended up getting put in the remedial math classes the next two years because of her. Which ended up being kind of okay because basically all the hot girls were in there with me and I was good at math so they had reason to talk to me for help. So in the end I still won lol.
That’s cruel!
Yeah that lady was a real bitch.
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
It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.
It’s more correlation than causal - for the same reason that we couldn’t just give every student straight A’s and expect them to have similar outcomes as students who would have otherwise earned straight A’s.
Working backwards like that is like trying to help someone lose weight by tweaking their scale to always show a healthy BMI.
trying to help someone lose weight by tweaking their scale to always show a healthy BMI.
Assuming the scale is functional. Which is is not.
It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.
You’re conclusion doesn’t follow. Case in point: kids who are kicked out of school are more likely to become criminals because they are children and have potentially lost the only thing remaining in their lives that kept them on any path of any kind. And they don’t have to start dealing drugs and robbing people with all the extra time they have. A kid who has dropped out or been expelled can still be charged with truancy in most jurisdictions, and their parents charged with the same crime and fined (up to $1,000 in many places). An underage child can be taken from their parents based on truancy violations alone. Then there’s loitering, trespassing, panhandling, and a whole mess of other non-violent offenses that give a high school-aged child a criminal record.
A person isn’t a criminal until they’ve committed a crime. They aren’t a convict until they’ve been found guilty of crime. Most of the kids being expelled, suspended, sent to Alternative Learning “SuperMAX” Centers are non-violent offenders. They are put out because they can’t behave.
The argument from here is often that we have to put the undesirables somewhere. After all, it’s not fair to sacrifice the education of the other, well-behaved students. I agree. I also assume that most people would want to help these children. On that assumption, I’ll finish this post with two bits of info:
- COPS In Schools (CIS) was created after the Columbine shootings. The grant appropriated $750-million to hiring police offers (School Resource Officers or SROs) for placement in schools. Despite their fancy title, these are police officers and they can and do, at a frightening rate, arrest children.
- In 2022, a bipartisan bill, the 2022 Bipartisan Safe Communities Act, was enacted. It granted $1-billion dollars to the nationwide development of mental health resources (counselors, social workers, programs) in schools, and the entire country rejoiced. In 2024, the Trump admin cut the grant because of DEI.
We’ve chosen to police children instead of help them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about punishment for behavioral issues or expelling students. What I’m suggesting is that the logic of grades determining behavioral issues is flawed, and it’s far more likely that both the behavioral issues and poor grades are symptoms of something else.
I’m saying that throwing out the legitimacy of our metrics by fudging the numbers for these students is not the right approach and is in fact a disservice to them.
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.
Very true. I think there definitely needs to be a framework for accepting late work in these cases, which is much better than calling it 50% out of thin air.
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%.
Grades have always been meaningless.
That could not be further from the truth.
What is meaningless is to reduce grades so much that it’s impossible to recieve a failing trade.
I had excellent grades in math and less than ideal in chemistry. So I spent less time studying math and more time studying chemistry. And what do you know… my grade in chemistry suddenly and completely unexpectedly became higher. While my grade in math was still holding steady.
It’s a real mystery how I figured out that I should spend more time studying chemistry.
I’m glad the school system didn’t fail you.
I do realise that not everyone had a good experience with their school system. But to blame the concept of grades on that is silly.
Grades are meaningless to some people. They matter greatly to other people.
Video games are meaningless to some people. They matter greatly to other people.
The difference is that I didn’t get a scholarship and an education due to my ability to play video games. It was my grades that paid my tuition.
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.
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 studenthas a teacher who has failed your class.If a teacher gives out homework and a student masters the homework, then they fail the test… Then the teacher fucked up obviously.
All we can say from the given scenario is that the student has not demonstrated mastery of the subject material.
It could be that the teacher fucked up, and tested improperly. I’ve seen tests that didn’t reflect the subject matter; the teacher failed.
It could be that Mom or Dad were the ones completing the student’s assignments for them all year. The student never actually learned anything; the student failed.
If every student had the same experience, I’d be happy to point fingers at the teacher. But when virtually all her students pass, and this one “workaholic” kid can’t, that’s not on the teacher. That’s on the kid.
(Apparent) hard work is not evidence of mastery.
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.
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
So they’re paying for fake grades?
Yes, this is all of paid “education”.
Private school I guess? I don’t understand the “or she’ll leave” if not.
Education under capitalism is not actually education.
It’s a country club for the rich and a prison for the poor.
Fixing Education
Doubt
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.
Meanwhile here in Croatia, some multiple choice tests actually have negative (penalty) points for choosing wrong so you can’t just guess.
