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Website Does Homework For Kids
A new French website allows children to pay older students to do their homework for them. Faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) allows children to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes costs 80 euros ($100). Founder Stephane Boukris says, "I realized there was a gap in the market. Add to that a dose of insolence, a zest of arrogance and the internet, and you have faismesdevoirs.com." I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
... is all that matters and not the actual comprehension, then they will find a way around the arbitrary system.
In other words, if you ask for bullshit do not be surprised when they bullshit you.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
That makes perfect sense to me.
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For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way. If you think about it, homework is what prepares your day to day job (though sometimes extreme deadlines begin to feel more like tests). I've been out of college for 2 years now and I've spent 99% of my work time doing what I would call homework, and about 1% doing what I would call tests.
Not that being able to think on your feet isn't important, sometimes it is the 1% that matters after all.
I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
Not everyone has older siblings, you insensitive clod!
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Aha, and a valuable lesson is learnt. Always do your homework before launching business plan ;)
In France, it's not uncommon to have in-class tests every week or two, in every subject. So it would be hard to not do any work for a very long time without it being noticed.
Rich kids buying themselves out of good education increases the probability for wasting their families fortune when they grow up. Honest, hardworking fellows will be happy to fill in the space.
Rich people getting richer with each generation aren't a good thing for any economy. Deterring work ethics of descendants, who never had to work in their live, have corrected this for centuries.
It uses knowledge to build the connections in the brain, rather than having the focus be on rote memorization of the knowledge itself.
The only 'connections' that Faismesdevoirs develops are the kinds involving how to use your money and influence to get other people to do your job. This isn't an educational method (like Montessori is). It teaches people how to weasel out of doing actual work.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is a great way to get Americans to learn a foreign language.
Lazy is a judgement by a certain standard.
Lets use another judgement, sweet, to illustrate. What is sweet (as in sugar is sweet)?
Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet. Worse, depending on what I been eating before, my mental and physical state, I may experience sweetness in a different way. So wether something is sweet or not is not an absolute. Yes as a society we must be able to label things as either sweet or not sweet based on general consent that doesn't exist. Sugar is sweet even for people who lack any capability of sensing sweetness.
Lazy, in the case of people being to lazy to be intrested works in a similar way. Sure, in lab you might be able to make any task intresting enough to engage a person who is really just bored or any of the other things you mention rather then "lazy". But the world is not a lab and schools/employers can not spend endless resources trying to make every bored person intrested. Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.
If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy. The problem with that is that you end up chasing a rainbow. There will always be a kid who is even futher behind. Even more disintrested even more bored. Chase that kid and all the others, who were intrested will instead be left behind. School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.
Worse, you can do this in school but trust me, that is not going to happen in real life. I see this regularly, "kids" who just never learned that in the workplace school rules do not apply. No, your employer doesn't own you a job, the board of directors is not going to fix your performance review to increase their grade point average etc etc. Most of the time, you won't even get in as nobody is going to hire somebody they got to motivate even to turn up for a job interview.
Your ideas are alright, just not practical. At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy. Sure, you might re-label them "too expensive to be motivated" instead if that makes you happy, but the result is the same. If you can't motivate yourself to a certain point, nobody is going to do it for you in the real world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
French students surrender their learning skills to a website.
Voila! :)
The problem is that exams are a retarded way of judging people too.
They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.
I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.
This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.
Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.
To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.
So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.