So an article came to my attention recently.
Teacher fired
So let me get this straight, a teacher has been fired, for teaching kids about how the real world works.
In what reality does that make sense?
It would have been a bit better if the person behind the firing wasn't the school's principal. The man who wrote a letter to the Edmonton School Board saying that Mr. Dorval had shown “obvious neglect of duty as a professional teacher, his repeated insubordination and his continued refusal to obey lawful orders.”
I'll give your brain a moment to process the irony in that statement.
All done? Good.
So apparently, letting students not complete work and give them "behavioural codes" when they didn't fix that problem is okay while giving them a flat out ZERO for the missed assignment and potentially alienating their feelings is a no-no.
Let me be very clear. People fail. That is how nature works. Someone is always going to be left behind, alienated and outright fail. Deal with it. Does a heard of Zebras running from some Lions stop and wait for the slowest to catch up so that everyone is on equal pace?
HELL NO.
They all run as fast as they can. The slowest get eaten. By not giving students zeros we're letting the system eat everyone up. Sure kids who do good work still excel, but why should they? They're going to pass the class whether they do the work or not. Most kids hate schoolwork. This gives them a free excuse to not do anything.
I skipped on some homework when I was in high school. What happened? I had a C average. I didn't put much effort into my grade 12 Spanish homework. What happened? I FAILED (only by a percentage point, mind you and I still got my diploma, but that was five years ago).
The principal of Ross Shepard high school has even gone so far to say: “I am here to tell you that you did nothing wrong,” Ron Bradley says. “Everything you did with regards to student achievement and high school completion was the right thing.”
He also was quoted as saying that the news media’s take on the policy is “narrow” and oversimplified.
“In my opinion, the culture of the media deteriorated to the quality of pulp fiction and talk radio,”
Dude, get your head out of your ass. You are encouraging kids to be lazy, unproductive slackers. With this kind of policy in effect, the crop of kids who graduate in a few years is going to be so warped that they won't have any idea how the real world actually works!
Now why is this happening? My theory is pretty simple, money.
Public schools are funded by governments. To the best of my knowledge, (this might not actually be the case, I will do some further checking, so don't quote me on this) the higher the grade averages, the more money they get. Zeros look pretty bad and the more of them that happen, the lower the average is so the less money they get. The no Zero policy means that the grade average stays high, since "behavioural codes" don't imfluence the grade average. But that's just my theory.
I just got an official reply from Alberta Ministry of Education and as far as money coming from them, the above is not the case. Each school board sends money as it chooses.
Teachers have spent the last couple decades teaching kids to "feel good about themselves" and "imagine how the world can be". The problem with that is that it doesn't really do anything useful for the students and all it does is breed lazy hippies.
Now if you've read the rest of this blog, you'll know that I am fairly left wing in both politics and beliefs. I always tell people to dream big and if you believe hard enough, you'll have a hard time letting yourself fail. That said, I hate this. It's encouraging kids to not do anything. After all, if they think that no matter what, they can't fail, then get out into the real world and fail constantly, won't that destroy their self esteem and self worth faster than getting an F on a homework assignment? What does that lead to? I'd rather not think about it. Failure builds experience. After all, Thomas Edison did find 2000 ways NOT to make a lightbulb. If we don't fail, then we never have the chance to stand back up, dust ourselves off and look at a problem from a different angle.
That's just my theory.
Teacher fired
So let me get this straight, a teacher has been fired, for teaching kids about how the real world works.
In what reality does that make sense?
It would have been a bit better if the person behind the firing wasn't the school's principal. The man who wrote a letter to the Edmonton School Board saying that Mr. Dorval had shown “obvious neglect of duty as a professional teacher, his repeated insubordination and his continued refusal to obey lawful orders.”
I'll give your brain a moment to process the irony in that statement.
All done? Good.
So apparently, letting students not complete work and give them "behavioural codes" when they didn't fix that problem is okay while giving them a flat out ZERO for the missed assignment and potentially alienating their feelings is a no-no.
Let me be very clear. People fail. That is how nature works. Someone is always going to be left behind, alienated and outright fail. Deal with it. Does a heard of Zebras running from some Lions stop and wait for the slowest to catch up so that everyone is on equal pace?
HELL NO.
They all run as fast as they can. The slowest get eaten. By not giving students zeros we're letting the system eat everyone up. Sure kids who do good work still excel, but why should they? They're going to pass the class whether they do the work or not. Most kids hate schoolwork. This gives them a free excuse to not do anything.
I skipped on some homework when I was in high school. What happened? I had a C average. I didn't put much effort into my grade 12 Spanish homework. What happened? I FAILED (only by a percentage point, mind you and I still got my diploma, but that was five years ago).
The principal of Ross Shepard high school has even gone so far to say: “I am here to tell you that you did nothing wrong,” Ron Bradley says. “Everything you did with regards to student achievement and high school completion was the right thing.”
He also was quoted as saying that the news media’s take on the policy is “narrow” and oversimplified.
“In my opinion, the culture of the media deteriorated to the quality of pulp fiction and talk radio,”
Dude, get your head out of your ass. You are encouraging kids to be lazy, unproductive slackers. With this kind of policy in effect, the crop of kids who graduate in a few years is going to be so warped that they won't have any idea how the real world actually works!
Now why is this happening? My theory is pretty simple, money.
I just got an official reply from Alberta Ministry of Education and as far as money coming from them, the above is not the case. Each school board sends money as it chooses.
Teachers have spent the last couple decades teaching kids to "feel good about themselves" and "imagine how the world can be". The problem with that is that it doesn't really do anything useful for the students and all it does is breed lazy hippies.
Now if you've read the rest of this blog, you'll know that I am fairly left wing in both politics and beliefs. I always tell people to dream big and if you believe hard enough, you'll have a hard time letting yourself fail. That said, I hate this. It's encouraging kids to not do anything. After all, if they think that no matter what, they can't fail, then get out into the real world and fail constantly, won't that destroy their self esteem and self worth faster than getting an F on a homework assignment? What does that lead to? I'd rather not think about it. Failure builds experience. After all, Thomas Edison did find 2000 ways NOT to make a lightbulb. If we don't fail, then we never have the chance to stand back up, dust ourselves off and look at a problem from a different angle.
That's just my theory.
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