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.
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
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.
That is unironically how donald passed.
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.
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 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 student~~ has 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I heard about this too, and it's so insane.
I saw an article recently about Mississippi (and/or Alabama?) 4th graders beating out California and New York on reading, and many were crediting that the state mandated phonics over this "take a guess" nonsense.
Am I reading this correctly? MS (and/or AL) having a better reading education system than CA & NY with this?? Wow.
Yes! MS went from 49th to 9th in like 10 years. Most people are crediting it to phonics and their willingness to hold students back if they don't learn the material.
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.
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 is by design. MAGA wants kids to be stupid, only stupid people vote MAGA.
"I love the poorly educated" DJT
Fixing Education
Doubt
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).
I don’t think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless.
The wider point is that grades are already meaningless.
It's so sad that people here believe that some imaginary meritocracy is being destroyed.
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.
No, sorry, actually teachers have always done that occasionally. It's just that now administrators are forcing it to be done in bulk.
The other thing is grade inflation. A D is passing, right? But many bosses pressure you to give your worst students Bs. And that has definitely gotten worse, too.
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.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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