"Students Today Are Completely Full of Shit."
rateyourstudents.blogspot.com
rateyourstudents.blogspot.com
I just don't understand why there is almost no pessimism in main-stream media. I guess it doesn't scale.
Read any articles about the economy recently? Plenty of pessimism. Now, if you're talking about cynicism - I love cynicism, at least when it's done well. Most people think being cynical means being petty-minded and always running down other people's motives and achievements. Far from it: a good cynic is someone who genuinely loves genuine achievement, but is prepared to articulately, pugnaciously and mercilessly draw attention to those who fall short. Good cynics are basically weary optimists.
It's a great little movie. Taken out of context the quote is a tad pessimistic, but the movie is actually quite uplifting.
Then their kids have to work a lot harder to succeed because their parents are (a) too narcissistic to provide emotional support and (b) too poor after they’ve crashed and burned to provide financial support. So the generation of people who thought too highly of themselves and did very little work spawns a generation of hard working, motivated people.
Sadly, what tends to happen after is that the hard working generation lavishes their kids with praise and financial support to make up for all the things they didn’t have as a kid which creates another generation of spoiled kids. But what can you do.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760307/ http://www.beforethemusicdies.com/blog/b4md
I dont think the teachers are to blame, tho, they're also stuck in the system. You think they dont' want to grab an arrogant "gifted kid" by the shoulders and shake him, or to tear up poorly written essays in front of the whole class? The good old days....
When Virginia introduced the Standards of Learning tests (years before NCLB), an amazing thing happened: Teachers were still griping, but they were griping about how they were going to teach all of the stuff they now had to teach. Importantly, their conversations turned back to teaching.
Yes, there is pressure to keep kids from failing. But they simply can't be given a "social promotion" now; they are going to take an exam and will be exposed.
The teachers in the districts where I've been personally involved (via my kids) did something I think was pretty smart: they started getting the parents to sign progress reports and notices nearly continuously throughout the term. In some cases, the parents had to sign off on the assignments as they were give! So there are few surprises at the end of the term. Kind of a CYA move, but with all of the pressures (as you correctly pointed out) they had to do something.
The standards to which they are teaching aren't minimum at all. They are pretty high. My issue with them is that they are not well defined. But I'll save that for another post.
I'll conclude this post with the observation that what teachers are complaining about now is not teaching to the minimum standard tests, but rather that they have to teach to the test at all. They don't agree that what is important is being tested because it's hard to quantify. I have some sympathy for that point of view.
That said, I've never gotten a gold star that I can remember, and I've definitely received my fair share of red X's.
I did get stamps/stickers on papers which were A's or, in the lower grades, check-pluses or E's. But I don't think that these in any way gave me a false sense of accomplishment; they only gave them out for top marks. (For the uninitiated, sometimes for minor assignments we were graded on a scale that went v+, v, v-, X or Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Poor.)
Maybe this is a big issue in other places, or perhaps private schools (that seems likely to me, based on the accounts of some people I know who attended private school), but it's definitely not happening everywhere.
Instead of waiting until they were old enough to spell correctly, they started letting them do what they could do earlier.
They do the same thing with physical fitness. To achieve the presidential award, you don't have to be as strong or as fast in third grade as you do in sixth.
Emphasis is mine. I think we've seen this before. Snore.
Sure, people come here because it's known to be hard. But once they're here that goes out the window. You're trying for grades, not challenges.
Of course it was full of pre-meds and chemical engineering majors (ie. pre-oil). Draw your own conclusions.
The departments that had the lowest mean grades across their courses were physics and economics. I took that to mean that physics was actually a very difficult major (I admit I'm biased here). Economics, on the other hand, was what most of the scholarship athletes majored in (my university didn't offer communications or marketing degrees that you sometimes see). Not to say that economics wasn't difficult, though I never had a chance to take any courses.
The system shares as much blame as its users. If challenging oneself was rewarded then we'd have more of it.
It's the difference between an elite education and the rest of us educated people^. Now, this doesn't apply to all the big name schools. I think there is a market for schools that make it tough. Look at which schools hackers think are the best in science/math/enginnering schools CalTech, MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. They are still tough with less grade inflation. (I apologize if I left your favorite top school out of the list, assume I included it)
^I may not agree entirely but it's an interesting read: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...
Sounds like a bunch of bs to me.
We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that.
OTOH, maybe this is an great opportunity for him to be the first good teacher many of these students ever had.