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Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades
A large number of schools participating in a pay-for-grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
Someone OWES my ass.
Glad it wasn't me. If I had that much cash back then it would have all been spent on pot. Smoking that much reefer would have to be bad for a developing mind... I might have become a physics major or something!
Before long children will be asking to transfer to the schools that pay the best.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
So ... what's the typical kickback to the markers?
did they pay this kid?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is dangerous: studies have shown that when you give extrinsic motivation for something, the intrinsic motivation tends to die away.
The paper I'm thinking of first observed that children in a class had lots of fun painting for no reason. Then, they started to extrinsically reward the children for painting, and the children started to paint a lot more. Then the rewards stopped, and so did the painting.
As the link points out, there is some debate about the truth of what I just said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
Imagine when they're going to college and need to pay to be able to study instead of getting payed to study. They probably won't bother if they never learned why they really should study. People better not get any ideas after this study...
Providing financial incentives makes people work harder. Duh.
All this does is bribe kids to cram as much information in as possible right before the exam, and I would be willing to bet most forget most of it in a week. It shows that kids have no passion for the material if the adults have to resort to bribes to get them to study. I've seen firsthand that people without passion for science/engineering, who only go into for the money or because their parents force them to, tend to make pretty shitty engineers and scientists...
Monstar L
The idea that offering real rewards for achievement would make a difference is something that should have been obvious to anyone. This environment of PC-Everybody-Gets-A-Trophy has really screwed people up quite badly. I will be very glad when the whole PC mentality gets scrapped.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
"Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone." I don't know anyone who learns for the sakes of education. I don't think the 40% of kids who did better would have done so just to learn either. Money is motivation. Learning just for the hell of it is not. I wish they did this when I was in school. I got really poor grades in classes that I did no care about. I would have done much better if they paid me to learn the things that I found (and still are) useless.
The quote from Jerry Maguire and your kids will say "Show me the money!". Gee, I wonder what does it speak about our economy and our situation.
Where do I collect?
Seriously though, why is paying someone to do what they already should be doing, a good idea? Even if they are getting better grades, it is developing a sense of entitlement, which will be far more damaging than bad grades in the future. The world in general seems to already suffer from an overdose of self-entitlement.
"And in other news, adults produce more stuff when they're paid for it."
It's not terribly surprising. A big problem with kids (high-school included) is that they don't understand the value of an education. If you pay them then their short-sighted nature is much more likely to place a value on it.
This just in, kids do better when rewarded. Full report at yesterday o'clock.
...and to think I worked hard for just the annual "Book-It" Pizza Hut party! Really, though, if kids come to expect this as the norm, what will the NEXT incentive need to be to entice them to take more difficult and challenging classes (which may be harder to get the higher grades in, comparatively)? But, in a way, this is kind of like the bonus system used at many corporations... if you meet certain milestones which are above the standard, you gain more recognition accordingly.
39.6 percentage points higher than last year, when the kids were in third grade.
Does this mean that kids are 39.6% smarter than we thought they were? They just needed a reason to show it?
From TFA:
About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program -- which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments -- improved their scores since last year's state tests by margins above the citywide average.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
When some kids were getting paid for grades ($5 for a B, $10 for an A when I was a kid). My parents refused. They would tell me that it was expected of me to get good grades, and I didn't deserve a reward for doing what I was supposed to be doing anyways.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Right or Wrong my nieces grades have started to climb as soon as I started a "Grade Bounty". It has brought focus, and there is more motivation other than just Mom hounding her. I am slowing ratcheting up the bar, sort of got her hooked as a freshman in High School and going to make Sophomore bar a little higher and so on. Far as I am concerned money well spent. Cracked me up when she asked Mom if I was really Uncle was really going to pay up...I said you get the grades...I will pay up.
Imagine when they're going to college and need to pay to be able to study instead of getting payed to study. They probably won't bother if they never learned why they really should study. People better not get any ideas after this study...
Wonder how much they got paid to do this study?
Pay 'em with books, toys etc.
Unless you are disallowed to score > 72% without salary...
I don't know if this is still done, but I remember growing up some fast food places would give a free ice cream or sandwich to a all-a/b report card.
...I never got any :(
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
...Even if they are getting better grades, it is developing a sense of entitlement, which will be far more damaging than bad grades in the future....
That insult is usually reserved for people who thing they deserve something w/o any sort of work on their part. In this case, the money is given to kids only when they get good grades (a.k.a. worked for them). I don't really feel your "sense of entitlement" complaint applies.
The catch, of course, is that 60% or more of his school grades are contributed by homework. Achieving 60% or less of the class credits gets you an F. So, here's a case where the kid does well on tests, usually getting As and Bs, but consistently gets Fs overall. He knows the material better than most of his peers, but is failing. I don't buy the BS that homework is an important life lesson that prepares you for the future, blah blah blah. I do realize, and my son either doesn't or just doesn't care, that any college education worth getting requires a lot of homework.
We know of at least one other child among his peers with pretty much the same picture. Neither cares much for monetary incentives.
you post under the name "cashman73". maybe cash motivates you too.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
This kind of stuff should be more a house hold thing, where parents decide to reward the kid if he/she performs well and exceeds a certain expectation, rather than schools doing this.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Hell, I only got a degree so I could put off working another six years (what? change majors a few times, and you too can turn a four-year stint in lazy paradise into six years).
I think this is a great idea. I bet it's pretty damn cost-effective, too. We could improve results while cutting some of the overripe plums in school budgets.
I wonder how much something like this would be resisted by the teachers' unions? It seems the teachers are big fans, since it motivates the students... but in the long run, I could see the unions getting very upset, since it allows for some method of improving education that does not stem directly from teachers.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I can pay my own kids. No need to pass through the "education" system.
Back when I was in highschool, a brief two years ago, my school district got a grant from the SOAR program which helped underwrite the costs for AP programs and testing. The students received not only a decreased application fee, but their fee refunded and 100 dollars on top for passing the exam. This didn't just encourage students to perform better, it caused the honors programs to increase drastically in their enrollment. Many more "average" students took advantage of the program and now are enjoying the college tuition credit that the AP exams offers. The most interesting thing to consider about this was that many students started referring to their education as their "job". I personally knew many students whose grades improved upon moving to harder material. The response I've heard from many accounts is that they felt that they finally were respected for the work they put into their grades. Now, the problem, I think, that may lie with this system as proposed above is that it seems to create no real boundary line between scholastic rigor and simply doing what is expected of you. If you show up and do what is asked of you, they pay you. It's not really creating the initiative among the students to own their own education. The moment that a student can realize for themselves that the teacher actually works for *THEM* and not the other way around is the moment that they can truly excel. All I can say is that I've seen the effects first hand. Our two local schools were public, poor, and had probably 700-850 students (consider that enrollment strongly decreases for junior and senior level due to drop out rates) combined for the total enrollment. We had 8 national merit finalists (top half percentile) and the National AP Scholar (only 1 or two given out per YEAR).
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
This only shows the short-term goals of people. Very few people think further than only 10 years ahead.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
This must be part of Obama's Grand Vision for America. After all, as Slashdotters, we all know that:
In Soviet Russia, Schools PAY YOU!!!!
Shhhht, don't give Fox News any ideas.
This is the society we have built. Consumerism, greed, status seeking etc.
"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They can use their newfound love for math to keep track of the national debt.
When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven.
It does absolutely nothing for students who are uncompetitive or who view competition as something negative. It also hastens the failure of those who are already disadvantaged. If you can't compete (successfully) because of your home life or other circumstances, then this will just re-enforce the failure.
Again this is another example of incompetency getting promoted to leadership positions. If you need to pay people to achieve, then you aren't a very good teacher. If you want to merely train people to be good robotic workers in industry then schools need to focus less on the "3 Rs" (reading, writing and mathematics) and more on direct vocational training.
I do suspect that this protocol is a direct result of the school principal trying to meet and exceed quotas. Of course I could be wrong, but it seems more often than not that these short-sited, pop-psychology social engineering methods are often used as a gimmick for career advancement.
I know, it's a joke, but you'll probably be disappointed. Everyone you'll be competing with has a degree, the subject of the degree and the magnitude are now the dominate forces (even when ridiculous). In some areas right now they argue you need a PhD to do silicon verification, when in fact I think you probably don't need any degree, at all to do what the job ACTUALLY requires. It's just a matter of having a huge number of equally qualified applicants after the same job.
The problem with this, for all of you who have jobs, is not about some wishy washy bullshit about "the joy of learning", it's about manipulating metrics for maximum return. It's not about how much you learned or how well you can apply your knowledge, but how to appear best on paper to get the paycheck. When the rubber meets the road, are you any more qualified to do what you say you can do? We've all known people who groomed that 4.0 GPA (or close to it), who didn't amount to anything or who got washed ashore when they jumped in the ocean.
To be fair, it is a very applicable life skill to large corporation life, and we all have to do it from time to time. But if you look around your organizations and note the flaws, defects and absolutely mind-bogglingly braindead behavior that somehow persist...behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
To the present day businessman, nothing else matters but making money today. Thus any short term manipulation that demonstrably shows profit, is a good behavior. To almost any other profession, including responsible businessmen, you have to be sustainable through at least your career, or however long it takes to return what you owe, ride out tough times, and guarantee your future. Teaching kids how to act in their short term best interests exclusively is not at all the right way to go.
Maybe you should take a couple classes in reading comprehension, since the line...
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
...explicitly states that most college students are not in it for education's sake.
Interesting. If this program was implemented when I was growing up, I probably wouldn't be a college dropout. I also probably wouldn't be fluent in Japanese with reading and writing capabilities as well as be a web developers with side knowledge of programing in gtk using C as well as an assortment of other languages.
At the point I am at now, I feel like the only thing that College has done for me is get me in a huge amount of dept. This program may have set me right.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
... When money is involved people tend to try and maximize the opportunity to get money.
I'd be more apt to belive that by offering money you are raising the stakes and you'll get more people cutting corners to get the money.
I'd wager more cheating then more intelligence, once you add money into the picture.
By adding money as a reward you are raising the stakes. At some point, the risk vs. reward line is passed and the reward is now worth cheating.
I've busted plenty of people trying to cheat and I have seen on serveral occassions the reason they cheat was "If I got all As I could go to cancun, or I get a new bike, or I get a car for graduation, etc.....".
FYI: Baseball caps are not the way to cheat. Neither is your cell phone on vibrate.
Example:
(They would send an SMS to the cheaters based on which 10 second span was the answer so:
1-10: A
11-20: B
21-30: C
31-40: D
41-50: E
51-60: Pause between questions.
So I sat there looking at the answer sheet and sure enough the SMS messages were coming in. Wasn't hard to throw out all 9 of them.
The problem is: VIBRATE IS ACTUALLY LOUD WHEN 9 PHONES ALL GO OFF AT THE SAME TIME.
Sadly these were adult students to boot...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I wonder if this would help keep kids on the books and off the pipe or off the corner selling dope... I mean if you could earn $500 for getting a good grade then it might not be so desirable for the kids to seek out gangs and drugs as a source of income... The situation is much more complicated, but it does eliminate some of the argument from the inner city kids who state that studying ain't gonna put food on the table. I know, many people are yelling "That is the parents job", but that is not reality for an inner-city kid with 4 siblings and 1 parent who is addicted to booze and/or drugs and spends any state/fed assistance on their habit....
Is $250-500/student worth it for the improvements obtained? That's not too hard to answer. Find an alternative score-improvement technique and compare the per-pupil costs.
(For a sense of scale, the per pupil cost of a full year's education in nearby Pennsylvania averages ~$10,700. This program would add ~5% to the cost of an education, though only if every student maxed it out.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Rich kids that go to public school already know what this is all about.
When one is artificially paid for a commodity that is normally without value, the acquisition of that commodity for sale is just good business.
In other words I get paid 10 bucks for an A, I well pay you 5 bucks to get it for me, and make a tidy sum, or "buy your classwork from your poor student friends for better grades".
Oh well at least they are learning something! America's future at work!
Unions don't care I bet.
If it hypothetically allow class sizes to get bigger with better results even then they won't care.
The union does not care at all about new teachers, and existing teachers are pretty much tenured.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's a poor excuse for a study. The underlying issues in (USA) public education today are:
#1 - We don't stratify. In other words, we uniformly put the slowest idiots in with everyone else, rather than putting the brightest in one class and on down the line.
#2 - classes move at the pace of the slowest idiot. The dumb shits hold up class, the mediocre kids learn nothing as well, and the smart kids get so bored (waiting for socially-promoted 8th-grade retards to learn stuff they already mastered in 2nd grade) that they start acting up.
#3 - real standardized testing - you know, anything that might require the kids to have learned something and prove it - has vanished. Between that and social promotion, there is no expectation on the kids to achieve anything, despite clear and repeated case studies and larger-scale studies proving that holding kids to high expectations works. But since standardized testing started to mirror social problems - read: certain ethnic groups (black, illegal immigrant, etc) with near-zero family structure and a subculture that sees intelligence as race treason, were showing very poorly in the standardized tests - more and more of the tests have either been dumbed down to the point of uselessness, or have simply been done away with entirely.
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors,
If you're going to offer the kids money, that's fine. One motivator works as well as another - when I was a kid, for example, a bunch of local restaurants chipped in and gave free meal coupons to any kid who made the honor roll.
First, though, you have to fix your metrics. The fact that they "doubled" achievement on the tests means little when the skills indicated by a "passing" grade on the newly-rebuilt "test" would, 20 years ago, have failed 2-3 grades lower.
People behave the way they're compensated.
The problem is that the metric never quite matches the goal. Anyone who's been in software development long enough has seen one or more "objective performance metrics" management fads come and go. With these there are incentives tied to making the dates, writing x lines of code, having fewer than y bugs, or whatever. What happens is that people make sure they pass the metrics. The trouble is that the metrics don't measure the desired behavior, just an imperfect proxy for it, and people figure out how to game the system. With programmers, they under commit, won't make changes, won't provide support, and won't work with their peers (though the exact nature of the dysfunction varies depending on the incentive structure). With students, the test becomes the goal and other aspects of learning are neglected.
Considering that most kids don't think past the end of the day (maybe the week if they know they're doing something fun on the weekend), getting paid for grades seems like an actual reward instead of "in twenty years, you'll be glad you got good grades now".
...an acceptable substitute for parental supervision and interest into what their children are learning. The latchkey, Playstation generation needs to be bribed to actually educate themselves because frankly their parents couldn't be bothered. Absolutely pathetic if you ask me. Children 50 years ago would die if they saw how easy kids have it today.
You're out of luck. The program will never leave schools where the students are exceptionally poor and where graduation rates as well as basic math and reading skills are dismal.
My parents had the same philosophy: pay the lazy kid who barely cares enough to get out of bed in the morning for getting good grades, not the kid who would do well regardless of whether or not you paid him. The con was that my idiot brother then proceeded to register for classes with the mentally disabled kids so that he could get the maximum payout for the minimum of work. At least they're giving rewards for scores on standardized tests to try to prevent kids from gaming the system, but you know that the kids will find a way.
I firmly believe that education is a state and local responsibility, so far be it from me to criticize these parents for deciding to collectively pay their kids to go to school... but if they tried it in my area, someone would be receiving an angry phone call.
This will put even more pressure on teachers to teach to the tests. Especially in low-income areas (where these trials are being done), teachers want their students to get what they're worth.
Kids aren't "getting smarter" (by the way, what does "smart" entail?) They're learning to play the game that is the educational system.
Also, if the sponsoring organizations can afford to pay each kid $250-500, where the heck are they getting those funds, and why aren't they giving it to inner-city schools in the first place?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
My parents paid me $10 for As (I got $20s/class if I got straight As) $5 for Bs -$5 for Cs -$10 for Ds and if I got a F, it didn't matter what my other grades were. I got nothing. After they started doing that, I was getting straight As.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I think this is a fantastic idea.
Many kids see no immediate positive benefit to education. I know I didn't as a kid. Oh, sure, I knew that "In order to get a good job, you need to go to college!" but I didn't really feel that my efforts got me any semi-immediate gratification. I mean, you're telling a teenager or younger to put out efforts for something that is years, or even decades, away for them.
Put an immediate, serious benefit within their grasp of months and you will see a lot of kids go for it.
The only thing that made me perform in school was fear of my parents' retribution for failure. Lots of kids don't get that encouragement so I think this is a wise use of school money.
I bet it pays better dividends, dollar for dollar, than pay raises for teachers. Paying teachers more might make them better teachers, which might impact their students. Paying students for good grades will DEFINITELY improve motivation.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone."
They aren't paying them to gain an education, they are paying them to get higher grades. Grades != Education, and the purpose of grades have always been about money.
People send their kids to private schools so they get better grades
Universities only accept people with higher grades so they'll hang around long enough for the university to get some money out of them
Grades in university are all about showing off to a future employer.
I've experienced plenty of chances at education being hindered by the need for better grades.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
In the U.S. good education does not equal higher pay. Maybe it did at one time, but certainly it is no longer true.
I would argue that the getting a degree from the right combination of institutions is the gateway to higher pay. Two examples to prove my point.
4.0 from public schools ==> transfer into 2nd tier State University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some lesser-known interships. This combination is not likely to end in higher pay. Rather, the student will probably make average wages in the first 5 years. What she does from there is up to her, but there are meaningful limits to the probability she would end up the most rewarded.
4.0 from private school attended by elites ==> transfer into 1st tier University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some well-known interships. This combination is most likely to end in higher pay because they are most likely to be hired by companies that pay more in the first 5 years.
More importantly the 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' dream so often told in the U.S. has vanished due to the enormous costs of attempting the latter. This is part of the enormous class disparities that have grown in the last 20 years.
So, pay your kid to earn good grades at the end of each year. It's very far into **their** sense of the future.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
So, I got good grades in high school and got no financial compensation. (PLUS, I worked a part time job.) These kids get paid for good grades, which *I* must pay for with my tax dollars.
I have to wonder if the parents became more involved with their kids once money was brought into the picture. I think another study needs to be done to see if there is a way to encourage parents to be good parents and if that affects kids' scores
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
You collect at the poker table. I hear having all 4 of the 8's is a really good hand. Of course, as in school, having all four A's is better, so avoid playing nerds.
> Seriously though, why is paying someone to do what they already should be doing, a good
> idea?
Punishing them for not doing it is better? That's the alternative.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is a huge difference between actually learning and preparing children for tests. Getting kids to pass a test might make them look smart but they'll lack the necessary skills to be anything other than someone who can parrot information.
After teaching in Cairo, Egypt for a year at a private school, I found out the value of an American Education.
$10,000 a year.
That's how much the richest of the richest in Cairo were willing to pay so that their kids could get an American education.
It's sad to know that we have to pay our kids to go to school now. We're teaching our children that their education has no value, which is so egregiously incorrect.
Can we conclude that kids these days can only see the short-term gains and hence do well in class if they are paid for good grades? One goes to school in order to have a better life in the future - a long term gain.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
you forgot to add #4:
In the USA public education is now just used as a tool for political indoctrination. With extremists at both ends vying to brainwash children.
"You have to get to the children when they are young and impressionable."
and #5
#5: Schools have now been regulated to substitute parents for a generation of deliquents who are incapable of parenting. Those children just get worse until they end up in high school with no sense of personal responsibility as their parents showed none.
Now teachers are being asked to change diapers for kids who's dead beat parents never bothered to teach how to use a toilet.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If you're going to offer the kids money, that's fine.
No, it's not fine, it will have terrible long-term effects. This is called behavioral/operant conditioning, which, in the case of children, will become deeply entrenched into the personality that they will develop as they mature.
Don't confuse this with parents who give their children extra allowance if they get good grades. When the reinforcement comes from the same entity which is providing the challenge (in this case, the schools), it becomes a far more mechanical, "pavlovian" pattern. I seriously hope that some psychologists are monitoring this program.
This isn't just a matter of culture (as others mention on this thread), this could have long-term effects that are completely unpredictable.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Christ this is bad, they get more for good grades than the company I work for gives out for bonuses.
I always got good grades so my Mom didn't beat my ass and ground me for 6 weeks til the NEXT report card. Some years I was grounded for an entire semester.
Maybe money gets kids' attention. If so, perhaps it's just a matter of making the material interesting.
They can buy already-done-work with this money. No motivation here, except for cheating more easily.
Grading paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
Fixed that for you.
Studies show that conditioning human beings with treats (and threats) does not instill values, but results in modified behavior that goes away if the pattern of rewards is stopped. Seems to work with dogs, tho.
The current education system is highly oppressive and does not cater to the children's needs for activity, play and natural way of learning. Let's not call mandatory children camps schools.
For more info check Alfie Kohn's work and Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk on schools and creativity.
Kids don't give a shit about all of that stuff, it's emotionally fucked up beauty pageant moms, football dads, and principals who give a shit about that stuff.
Kids get the checks and start thinking about XBox games and other shit they normally wouldn't get to have.
What the fuck do people get an education for, to get a better paying job that's what.
Why do kids get such shitty grades, because school is like sewing soccer balls in a 3rd world country except it doesn't produce any tangible goods that's why.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
My motivation for good grades was avoiding a beating. That seemed like a pretty effective motivational strategy.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
#1 - We don't stratify. In other words, we uniformly put the slowest idiots in with everyone else, rather than putting the brightest in one class and on down the line.
That's certainly not universal for the US. My district stratifies. Not sure how to go about looking up how many do or don't though.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
He is now a junior in high school and gets mainly Fs, except in music which he enjoys so he gets an A, usually. He consistently scores at or above the 97th percentile in the numerous standardized tests that kids take these days, including the PSAT. He will soon start taking the SAT and will presumably do well enough.
Your child may be better off being home schooled. The slow pace and innanity of the environment he is in is supremely demotivating. College is almost exactly the same thing, so he won't do well there either. Unless, maybe he goes to a music college. This is pretty typical of gifted kids who don't fit into the square peg definition of excellence offered by most schools.
It's your job as a parent to keep trying different things.. If he's that interested in music, he needs real teachers, real discipline to become a competent musician. In exchange for him doing some homework, get him a good music teacher.
Don't give up now
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
From the article:
"It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven, where nearly 90 percent of students qualify for federal poverty aid.
It is sad to see that in America we have tied self-worth to monetary possession. Worse, that the most impoverished feel the least worthy.
My page.
Who said anything about learning? This is for grades. I suspect there are some underpaid teachers willing to accept kickbacks for adjusting a few grades.
It was not a 40% improvement in individual scores. The article states that in some schools it was a 40% improvement in the number of kids meeting some exam standard. What the prior or new scores and what the standard is was not given. Paying may help but I doubt by 40%.
That's completely understandable especially if you're young. I know it wasn't until I got older that I could really appreciate learning for the sake of learning.
I think giving kids money for good grades is a great idea. At that age it's hard for kids to think very far into the future and money is an immediate and good motivator.
Is the opposite true? If you hit your kids for bad grades does that help? :-)
In the end would that be cheaper?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Hell, I only got a degree so I could put off working another six years (what? change majors a few times, and you too can turn a four-year stint in lazy paradise into six years).
Wow - Your college experience was a helluva lot different than mine. When I was in school, I was working my ass off to cover tuition, books, rent, food, etc. And earning an engineering degree besides. I was in school for 6 years too, but only because I wanted a Master's, I managed to graduate High School as a college Sophomore, and I had to bail out of school a couple of times to take internships/co-ops that paid more than I could make locally.
Lazy paradise? I remember a foggy sleep-deprived existence that involved short naps between busting ass. What's your trick?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
This will certainly make it easier for kids to get the money to pay other people to do their homework.
as long as they learn something
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
English Lit.
In some areas right now they argue you need a PhD to do silicon verification
In my experience, nerdy professors are far worse at spotting fake boobs than your average joe.
Bull Hockey.
The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic. I don't see how this is any different. Providing incentive to work harder at a task and achieve results, rather than simply stumble into them due to your 'natural talent' is pretty much the default story of how people become successful.
Your arguement seems to boil down to "convincing kids to work harder is bad because kids who work harder will look better than kids who don't". Of course kids who work harder are going to come off better, that's sort of the point. Given the rest of your comment is a rambling complaint against people who test well but can't perform, I don't exactly understand how you could possibly bitch about a method which actually convinces the children to perform well so you can accurately test them at their real performance level rather than at their "I could give a shit, why should I care what my score is." level.
If a school pays kids for good grades, wouldn't they naturally transition to expecting to get a raise at work for good performance ?
:)
Whereas with parents paying for good grades would either leave kids feeling like they've gone as far as they can when their parents die, or depending on the government for being rewarded when they do good at work.
Could you explain the problem to me please ?
I really don't want to read some article you've dug up on the Internet either, I actually want to read the explanation in your own words, as you understand it.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
That would be silicone verification. I don't believe a degree is required for that. It also happens to be a very hands-on field.
We don't stratify. In other words, we uniformly put the slowest idiots in with everyone else, rather than putting the brightest in one class and on down the line.
Putting the dumb kids in one class would only pigeon hole those kids. They would be made fun of at school, and systematically taught that they are not as good as the other kids. Whoever ends up teaching "the dumb class" would naturally have low expectations for these supposedly helplessly dumb students, and as we all know, teachers teach worse when their expectations are low. So your plan would help the kids who are already smart, while ruining the lives of kids who need the most help. Hell, many times putting a very dumb student in a class full of smart students improves the dumb student's grades, because good study habits rub off on them.
And even without corruption it isn't as if a grade actually reflects how well the material was learned. Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher. Teachers reward those who repeat what the book rather than those who demonstrate actual understanding of the material.
In many schools they remove credit from students grades for frequent absence, frequent tardiness, or as a result of in school suspension. Those things have no impact on whether the student understands the material taught but school funding is determined largely by attendance metrics. Any student who fully understands the material taught in a class, at any level of education from K to Masters should receive an A in the class if the purpose of a class is for students to learn the material and the grade is a measure of how well they have learned it.
Amateur. I spent 10 glorious years in 3 different schools, changed my major 5 times, and still haven't graduated!
WTF?
How is this worse than kids not learning in the first place?
Most kids see no value in education because they're kids.
Paying them, not only prepares them for life, it stresses the value of hard work and provides real results for that work.
Kids learn both their curriculum and that working hard provides tangible returns.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Actually finance theory as found in the textbooks says that looking for short-term profit is "good". It's called "future value", and roughly implies that an 18-month turn-around in investment is what you should aim for to maximize profit. Whether IT should be "exempt" or not is a contentious issue.
But you need to counter the theory with something at least as solid if you want to properly counter alleged short-sighted investing.
Table-ized A.I.
What Would Alfie Cohn Do?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618001816/ref=ase_fastcompanycom/102-5164850-9600113?v=glance&s=books
These anecdotes seem to fly in the face of research on the subject. What is being unsaid about this "experiment"?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Given that the current system is based on rewarding students for education (albeit with grades, not money), changing what the reward is wouldnt make a difference. The Overjustification effect has already taken place. How many of your friends in school did their homework 'Just for the sake of learning'?
What's so terrible about wanting to get paid? When I was a kid, I was told that it was my job to be a student. I would have worked harder at that "job" if I had been getting something of value to me in exchange for my effort. I got news for you: most people are mercenary little shits. We don't want to bust our asses for no good reason. Why the hell should we?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
... after all, if there's no money in it, why do it?
Unchecked capitalism is the way our whole society should
be run. All those little old ladies of the future had better have
$5 bills spare to make sure they get help crossing the street.
Let's review what the "all that matters is money" mentality has accomplished on Wall Street:
* Bernard Madoff
* Adjustable Rate Mortgages - Who cares if they will never be able to pay their home loans, more money for us!
So now we're even moving this lesson into the classroom? If you thought Bernard Madoff was bad, wait until the working class is made up of students who were taught in school that all that matters is their paychecks and incentives - not hard work or achievement.
I remember, quite vividly, a story from grade school. I was 8.
Me: "Some of my friends are getting money for good grades."
Mom: "And?"
Me: "Can I get paid for my grades?"
Mom: "No."
Me: "Why?"
Mom: "Because your dad and I *expect* you to get good grades."
I thought it was not particularly fair. Not necessarily that I wasn't getting paid, but that others were when I was doing (in many cases) more work and achieving more. I said such... actually, it came out as, "If I'm doing what they're doing, why do they get what I don't?" and was told that "life isn't fair, but we're not going to bribe you to do something that you should be doing anyway."
In hindsight, I'm quite glad that they didn't. I ended up much better for it. I also think I did better overall than most of the kids who were paid. My goals were sold to me as long term from the get go. I needed to do well in school, not because I'd get some reward in 3 months, but because if I wanted to do what I want for the remainder of my life, I'd have to work to get there. It forced me to look years down the road right away. Plus, when I didn't grasp that (the idea of planning 10 years in the future when I was 8 was a pretty big thing to get my head around) they were more than happy to help me with that.
This sort of program feeds into feelings of entitlement, and to the feeling that an action requires an immediate reward. Immediate success rises, but when these kids get out of school, how are they going to react when they don't immediately get what they feel like they deserve? I have a feeling that it'll be an unhappy awakening.
Even so, I would prefer an educated drug user to an uneducated one.
Honestly I'm not surprised at this at all. And I also don't think it has much to do with "ego boosting". I think it has everything to do with making the kid feel like the test is not a pointless colossal waste of time. I know when I was a young kid in grade school tests certainly felt like that to me. Kids don't generally see the big picture and the long-term benefits of things. I also know that when I was a kid, if you gave me the choice between having fun or doing something extremely boring that would probably pay off in 10-20 years the choice was a no-brainer. However, getting paid gives a result almost immediately, and gives a kid access to things they may not get access to any other way.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Right as compared to the golden business men in days past who never ran fly-by-night schemes, and had only the greater welfare of the world in mind.
If businesses aren't forward looking enough, it is because their incentives are wrong. Perhaps we need to start imposing liability for long term health of a venture/corporation.
Again and again...why does *no one* understand the simple principle of CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION? The teachers may have inflated the kids grades...what if you were one of those teachers? And the low-income kids really needed that $500? I would do the same thing; Give everyone an A, whether they earned it or not...would not want to be responsible for them starving...
Let's not forget that the schools are now teaching to the tests to improve the overall school scores thanks to No Child Left Behind. Learn what is on the test so the scores look good.
Once a child is promoted it is now the current teacher that is to blame for them not making the grade even though they should have been held back three grades before.
As well as some underpaid parents willing to cheat with/for their kids...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Could we get a source other than the New York Post please? The paper called itself "New York's daily picture newspaper". Since Murdoch took over, it has only gotten worse. It makes me embarrassed to live in New York City.
From Wikipedia:
"In 1980, the Columbia Journalism Review asserted that "the New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem - a force for evil."
The New York Post is for gossip, clever headlines, and sports. But not for journalism. It's like slashdot, but dumb.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Interesting I've never heard of such a thing. I mean yes there are honors classes but beyond that...
In most schools things like attendance, disciplinary measures, homework completion, and how well instructions were followed impact grades as well despite having nothing to do with the purpose of a class which is to convey a volume of knowledge to the child. If the child understands the material covered in the class the appropriate grade is A and all other factors are irrelevant.
But since schools are not set up to recognize actual learning and instead push discipline, conformity, attendance, neatness, physical education, needless extra effort on assignments, etc then honors classes are not a valid way to divide the classes.
Are you kidding me? People actually needed a study to tell them that others, especially children, are financially motivated?
I am no Einstein here, by any means, but I did manage to nearly ace the SAT in 8th grade and still manage to fail a course a year in high school. Why? Because it didn't matter. I still got into a good college, am finishing up a degree in IT (with over 3.8 GPA), and just wish someone would have thought of this sooner. Hell, if I could get paid by being smarter than all of my peers, not only would I have done better in school... I would have had that spiffy new PS2 the day it came out.
I believe it was Daniel Tosh who said something like: "Can money buy happiness? Maybe not, but it can buy a wave-runner. Try frowning on one of those."
Something witty.
Wow, you really don't know anything about education, do you? Do you really think that U.S. doesn't compare well against other countries is due to the fact that the brainy kids are insufficiently brainy, as opposed to the fact that we have a much larger percentage of kids that perform abysmally? It's the failure to educate the ones at the bottom that is the problem, not the failure to accelerate the ones at the top.
First of all, I can only type so much before I need to get back to work, so referring a reader to an article on Wikipedia will likely cover far more ground.
But sure, I'll bite:
If a child receives a reward from a family member, that person will be able to "bend the rules" at any point, because there's no actual contract. They could gradually provide diminishing returns, and/or decide that grades on a certain subject are worth more "starting right now" (because, for example, the student is great in math, but bad in literature, so the priority shifts to increasing the literature grade).
On the other hand, an institution is implementing a mechanism. That same institution is providing the behavior pattern that will be reinforced. No matter how many rule subsets that institution applies, it will always have to be uniform, so the children could, in effect, "game the system". For example, if getting your grade from a D to a B provides a higher incentive than increasing a grade from a C to an A, then the kids will do the math. It's an objective mechanism, which, if modified, will be modified uniformly. You won't give different students different rewards for the same exact achievement. This becomes a static, objective reinforcement mechanism which *does not exist in the real world*. When they encounter real-world motivation systems, the rules will suddenly change, and they'll have to battle their now-ingrained expectations.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Yeah, we wouldn't want kids to get used to the idea of getting paid by the entity that provides them challenges. How would they cope with the real world.
nuf sed
You expect a grade schooler to care about education for the sake of education?
Unless you have a much higher opinion of the us public school system than I do, grade school is pretty boring, and you don't learn much for how much time you put in. Also, more importantly, grades and learning are very different things. I got terrible grades because I hated homework, yet I still got a good bit out of many of my classes. In high school, i got bad grades in most of my AP classes, yet come time for AP exams I still got 3s, 4s, and 5s, and I feel like I learned a good bit. I was interested in the content, I just wasnt motivated to do what I needed to do to get decent grades.
However, during my last year of high school (which just ended), I held a job as a programmer, which I got because I was well qualified, even if I was young. So far, I'm paid well and this, along with the fact that things i do have bearing on real life, motivates me greatly, so i really work to get things done, and keep my job. In grade school, what happens if you're lazy? You get yelled at, maybe held there longer even. There is no perceived reward, and at that age few kids see the value of the education, and frankly I don't blame them. Our school system is boring. Giving kids some motivation to learn is a good step towards getting kids learning and our education system back on track.
You eliminate a lot of possibility of gaming the system by making the tests standardized, graded by a machine, and having basic cheat avoidance like multiple versions of a test. But yes there is certainly a way to do this very badly.
Precisely. I don't know anyone that goes to school for any reasons other than "because my mom makes me" and "so I can make lots of money". This experiment makes perfect sense. People tend to work harder for concrete, external rewards rather than abstract, internal rewards.
They would be made fun of at school, and systematically taught that they are not as good as the other kids
Well, that's the problem right there. See, we need to teach the Alphas and the Betas to be grateful to the Deltas for doing all the hard work, and teach the Deltas that they're very important and that they should be grateful to the Alphas and the Betas for making all those hard decisions.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yes, it definitely would. See the reply I just posted above to Joebert's question.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I may be unfairly grouping "slow" with "disruptive" but from what I remember in middle and high school is that the slower kids tried their hardest to create an atmosphere where studying was not considered cool and they disrupted the class a great deal. I was in almost entirely honors classes in high school but I moved in 11th grade, and due to differences on how classes were titled I was put in the "slow" foreign language class. Aside from the pace being very slow, I was annoyed at how the teacher had almost no control of the class and I had a hard time learning. Electives went the same way- the pace was just infuriatingly slow and I often wondered at the end of the class if I had really learned anything at all.
I never heard slurs of "hey stupid" thrown around, but I heard "dork" and "nerd" many times, every day. We need to give students who want to succeed an environment where they feel comfortable doing so. Kids where I grew up on Long Island are practically forced to go to college and get office jobs even when they have absolutely no desire or aptitude for office work.
The world needs plumbers too- segregating the educational system in high school into vocationally oriented and academically oriented programs will help everyone in the end.
I remember taking my first English test in high school. We'd all read this book, and were to be tested on it. I read the book cover to cover, and felt like I really understood it. Not just what the book said, but what it meant. I felt like I picked up on the theme of the book, and the message the author had embedded in the story. Nobody knew that book better than me.
But when I get the test, not one question required me to discuss the book intelligently. It was a multiple choice test, where each question asked you to recall some obscure detail in the book. Example: What was the name of so-and-so's aunt. How many times did whatshername etc. The questions did not test whether you understood the book - just that you read it and memorized parts of it.
And that's the problem with schools and testing - you can pass a test without even understanding the material. Just memorize the details without exploring real concepts and ideas. And thus, it's no wonder this program works. Kids don't need to think in order to pass school, they just need to devote unreasonable amounts of time memorizing facts. And of course, nobody wants to do that sort of tedious studying, unless they are paid for it.
Our school system was set up to prepare students to work in mechanical, fragmentary jobs. They teach kids to memorize and spew out information on command. They teach kids to obey authority, and walk in lines. They teach kids to sit in rows and eat lunch at scheduled times when the bell rings. It's a great way to prepare kids to work in textile mills. Sadly, we have a different type of economy now, where those skills no longer apply.
We must teach kids the intrinsic value of learning. We must teach them to think for themselves, and question the world around them. We must reward creativity, and encourage imaginations to run wild. The students who learn those lessons will succeed in todays information economy. Paying students small wages to do trivial work will only prepare them for jobs where they are paid small wages to do trivial work: McDonalds.
grants, debt, scholarships, and summer work for spending cash.
I think whether this sort of incentive works well depends heavily on the individual. Financial incentives wouldn't have worked out for you; they would have done me a world of good.
Why? I would have learned how to actually work hard, instead of cruising by on as little effort as possible. It's a problem I'm still working to overcome, post-college-graduation. I graduated by a hair's width, but it would have been avoided had I worked harder earlier in college. I knew this, intellectually, at the time, but there had never been an incentive to get good grades instead of mediocre grades before college, so I couldn't work up enough will to actually care about getting good grades in college. By then it was an entrenched pattern.
(There were incentives to not get bad grades - my parents once banned me from the computer for an entire summer for getting a D. But that didn't make me get As, it made me get low Bs.)
That depends if you think that knowledge gained is the only purpose of school and I think you would be hard pressed to make such an argument.
If you're trying to produce people who can work together and be productive members of society then it makes sense to dock people that not followed rules which directly relate to that. In-class suspensions for disruptive behavior makes a lot of sense to me in this regard although I don't consider hugging in the hallway to be disruptive.
Much of the business world involves finding constructive tasks to perform when you are bored out of your skull so it makes sense that school would discourage disruptive behavior even if the student proves that he understand the materials being taught.
Do I think schools should be this way? I don't know, society has a way of filtering out people that are destructive or at least finding creative ways to embrace the destructive nature of particular individuals. I don't think students should be robots but I also think disrupting a class is unacceptable so I guess I like it but would favor relaxing many rules that were only enacted because a few people were uncomfortable with the setting such as the banning of hugging.
"English Lit" is only half the equation. I think that for college to be a "lazy paradise" you need:
"English Lit" + "Easy source of income that doesn't mind funding your slacking ass"
As an engineering major, I could run off and co-op making 5-6x minimum wage. How people put themselves through college flipping burgers is beyond me... Especially if you're in one of those demographics that's discriminated against (or completely excluded) at scholarship time. May the gods bless the people doing that with one hand while supporting a family/kids with the other.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
They're the ones who deserve to be mocked, not the smart kids or the hard-working kids.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I thought the american government had a group that does that and gives certifications, its the F.B.I.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Er, I meant "it would pose a problem"... I usually double check before I post...
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
You know, I hear this and my immediate reaction is that it must be bad that they are teaching to the test. I think this is what is expected. But the other side of this coin is that what is on the test has been determined to be age appropriate material for this country, and therefore is exactly what teachers should be teaching. That is, kids in 5th grade need to be able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division with remainders. If you can do more, great. If not, then everyone else may be held back a little bit but the whole class needs to get there together in order for the school to do well.
In my school district they have something called "AGP". Academically Gifted Program. Both of my kids have been through the program several years now and it offers those kids who might otherwise get bored, or need a different kind of curriculum, a chance to excel in a less structured environment. This is how my school district takes the smarter kids and gives them extra, while still having them sit with the slower kids for most of the school week.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
When I was a kid, if somebody had asked me why I went to school, my answer would have been, "Because state law requires that I do so."
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I think if they pay the students for good grades, it would only be fair to charge for absences, bad grades, class disruptions and anything else that "inhibits" learning.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Nice liberal arts crack. Actually liberal arts is generally one of the biggest majors at most universities. I looked up my alma mater - University of Texas - most popular are Biology, Business, and Liberal Arts.
I think barring school specialization, you'll always see Liberal Arts at the top. There are still a large number of people who are after an education and realize that college is not a vocational school.
Exactly. I expect and look forward to more and more kids hacking the system. After all, money & grades, can be gotten in ways more efficient than learning. As learning is unpleasant and streamlined towards making children good workers at the cost of killing their natural creativity, curiosity and artistic abilities, as well as turning them into prisoners for 8+ hours every day, I see schools as a challenge to the ones that will not be oppressed. I hope they find ways out and around.
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors...
After all, it _is_ possible for people to double major, a liberal education is a wonderful thing, blah-de-blah, but paying kids just makes too much sense to get side tracked. Just look at how cheaply results are attained at a few hundred dollars/student, and it places the responsibility and motivation exactly where they should ultimately reside. Giving kids money for achievement just means they can have pride in achievement -- and money. The two are synergistic, not exclusive.
Something has to be done. When I graduated decades ago I was one of 10 honor students among 81. This year my small town graduated 41 honor students among 62. And still flunked No Child Left Behind for the second year. It's all B.S. right now. I think we do need objective measurements of success because otherwise local schools will call everyone an honor student and proclaim excellence achieved -- but NCLB isn't being funded and has its own issues. So if it works, pay the students.
And let's keep in mind that some of the dumb shits (as measured by the schools' broken measuring sticks) are actually geniuses slowly suffocating.
You pretty much described Special Ed. Yet we accep that alright.
If you're going have the dumb kids mingle with the smart ones, at least hold the dumb ones to the higher standard.
Not only that, but they're set up to recognize "guessing which answer the teacher wants" instead of "learning the material". Looking back, the teachers I learned the most from were the ones who didn't mind being corrected by students, but nowadays kids can get in trouble for that sort of thing.
I'm sadly reminded of the "Independent Thought Alarm" from the Simpsons.
Even university programs have this problem. I took a networking class last September whose course material was only tangentially a test on whether you knew networking. The primary skill determined by the course labwork was whether or not you had mastered Python sufficiently. (Did you know that Python will silently fail to cast a string-containing-an-int to an int without any warnings, even when it causes bad, bad behavior, and even though Python pretends it's dynamically typed? I didn't know until I had wasted eight hours debugging my networking program only to find that the bug in the teacher's code and was due to checking an int against a string-containing-the-same-int instead of explicitly casting it first.)
Yes, it helps to know Python. But rather than teach me TCP/IP networking, it made the task much more difficult.
Um... </rant>
So yeah. School systems need to be reoriented to encourage and test for actual learning, instead of whether you can read the teacher's mind.
I don't know, society has a way of filtering out people that are destructive or at least finding creative ways to embrace the destructive nature of particular individuals
Where else would we find police and armed forces recruits?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
My high school (and all others in my county) paid $40 for every AP test that you made a 4 or 5 on. We had some of the best AP test grades in our region of the state (except the Euro test, every fails that one). On calculus the year I took it no one made less than a 4, most were 5's.
I see, so doing what works is "corrupting," doing what fails isn't.
Kind of the core of why academia has been on a downhill slope for decades.
As someone once said, "the word "academic" is a well-known synonym for the word "meaningless.""
That being said, I don't think that, for the most part, the public school system can be fixed with "band-aids."
That's why the solution isn't to stratify students, it's to make classes a little smaller (~15 students per class), make sure they're fairly well mixed with respect to the average intelligence of the students in the class, and for the love of all that is digital do not teach at the rate of the slowest learner. That's one of the biggest issues with the current system - it's not that we need to stratify, it's that we need to challenge the students more. It doesn't do anyone any good to only challenge the dumb ones.
Or, we could just pay teachers more who are more effective (ie, get their kids to score better), and not pay the students anything.
Hell, many times putting a very dumb student in a class full of smart students improves the dumb student's grades, because good study habits rub off on them.
Yeah... no. The grades of dumb or average students does not increase by hanging around smart students, as a general rule. Smart students do not necessarily have good study habits (in fact, some of the smartest have no study habits whatsoever, and many slack off), and sometimes the smart students can bring down the grades of those who don't quite catch on as quickly and easily. A student who is not quite as bright can work their ass off in a course, and still do below average, while a bright individual can fool around, distract those who need to pay full attention, and nearly ace every exam.
Both their and your motivation sounds like 'capitalism at work' to me.
How much improvement in scores is seen if the teacher promises to have sex with the A students?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Maybe I'm an anomaly, but I'm only getting a degree to earn more.
Please, go to a trade school and stay out of the universities.
Out of curiosity how is the real-world motivation system different? If I work hard and continue to achieve great work then I do see more income and that's here in the real world where I get a raises and/or bonuses based on my performance.
There's also nothing saying that a school couldn't raise the standards necessary to get money which would affectively raise the bar even further encouraging students to perform. I remember my frustration back in high school and lower grades with knowing that I would never use the knowledge that I was learning at the time in real life and so I didn't care about my grades even though I did fairly well anyways.
In college I was of course paying to be there so I took it a lot more seriously which is rare as a great many college students have their parents paying for everything. I had just enough from student loans to keep me in ramen noodles and it worked out alright.
I also look at my niece when she moved here to AZ where they aren't exactly known for great schools, her parents actually managed to find a school that was more work and held student to a higher standards than even VT where they were living. As a result she struggled for a while but with lots of support for her parents and her uncle she's back on top and performing well even though she does have a few areas where she needs to continue to work hard to catch up on. It's becoming fun for her to learn because everyone around her encourages it and provides her with some guidance when she needs it and that is sadly what a great many families are missing. Absent that I don't see a problem with trying to bribe the desire to learn out of kids since as I said, the real world functions in the same way.
As an engineering major, I could run off and co-op making 5-6x minimum wage. How people put themselves through college flipping burgers is beyond me....
Lots of overtime.
And picking up a second job helped also.
Of course with 2 jobs, taking classes full time and graduating in 4 years was out of the question.
What's your trick?
Parents. Plus, he's still living in the basement.
Since I am late to the comments game, the chance of modding up is low, and there is no intrinsic value, and therefore it is not worth for me to to risk receiving a less than 5 score grade.
I would have written something insightful, but now it is not worth it.
There are ramnifacation to introducing certain types of incentatives.
Also very important is the impact of how the students perceive knowledge sharing.
The competitive environment can cause students to be more closed and protective
believing they will then have a competitive advantage, where instead they would
benefit from learning in collaboration, sharing and teaching each other,
similar to what we do on slashdot very openly and freely.
(even despite of the point system which also motivates some,
but it takes experience to know the value and cost of such systems)
"Hell, many times putting a very dumb student in a class full of smart students improves the dumb student's grades, because good study habits rub off on them."
Bullshit.
Good to know my theory has met with some real-world verification.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I have to say, the misconceptions in both the summary and many of these comments raised my blood pressure.
For some reason education runs deep with people. Everybody and anybody thinks they're an expert and has opinions. But barely any of them can tell you the core psychological differences between different ages of children. A 4 yr old is VERY different than a 6 yr old in what motivates them and what their brains are receptive to. And an 11 yr old and 13 yr old are extremely different as well. Development is NOT linear. And while sitting an adult down and lecturing to them may be the best way to transfer knowledge to adults, it is completely unnatural for nearly every stage of childhood development. So they end up hating learning and we have to resort to 'tricks' like this to entice them.
The main difference between a successful genius like Edison or Da Vinci and an average person, is that the genius is fascinated by things and loves to work on them.
This program itself is a band-aid. It may very well be helpful in desperate areas. But it's a band-aid on top of a very deep problem in the structure of what we think 'education' should be. When the critics argue that "paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone", it doesn't matter. The way the current system is set up, there's no way that a majority of the kids are going to love learning.
I'm a certified teacher in the US. By pure chance I came across a school that used a method spread by a Dr. Montessori (the same method that Larry Page & Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, credit as a major factor in their success).
The first thing that struck me is how eager these kids were to work on things and find things out on their own. The smartest kids were well beyond most of the ones I knew in mainstream education and the slower kids STILL loved learning. Then I realized how happy the children were. Yes, there are always problems, but very few were bored and no one sat around like a broken shell of a human waiting for the day to be over.
I ended up getting my certification in Montessori elementary education, and the classes were MUCH more thorough and in depth then when I went for my mainstream certification. Now I feel like I was somewhat amateurish when I taught before. I had little idea about how to really work with the psychological sensitivities of each age and turn them into something truly developmentally constructive.
Only a small part of development is the transference of knowledge, which seems to be the main focus of current mainstream education (and what this little pay-for-grades project helps with). But if the aim is switched to aiding human beings in their life and development, then we start to use knowledge as a tool.
We use the knowledge to develop the brain, rather than trying to drop knowledge into an undeveloped mind as if it's an empty container waiting to be filled. This kind of development is what I think Einstein was talking about when he said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
I urge any parents to look into the Montessori method, and visit a school in your area if you can. But understand that some schools use the name without really using the method.
This program that pays children for their grades is like painting on old, crumbling house. It does help a bit, and it definitely looks nice. But I'd rather get inside and strengthen the architecture. The paint will wear off eventually.
Spoiled brats. Some people would kill to get an education of any kind.
if the purpose of a class is for students to learn the material and the grade is a measure of how well they have learned it.
That is debatable, some students are capable of learning things very quickly; however students for example who the school says are "diagnosed" with ADHD can't seem to pay attention long enough to write it down, thus lower grades and and IEP.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
Yeah, and what happens when they fuck up and classify kids wrong?
I suffered under a horrible, incompetent algebra teacher in eighth grade, got the first 'C' of my life in that class, and when the time to pick high school classes came around, the guidance teacher looked at my transcript, looked at me, and said something to the effect of "Oh, looks like you're not very good at math, let's not have you bothering your pretty little head with all that hard-math-and-science stuff." I got packed off into the dumb kids' science class, where they taught us the basic concepts of chemistry and physics because they didn't expect us to ever take those subjects for real. I had already learned it all on my own, was excruciatingly bored, spent entire class periods in the back reading the AP physics textbooks under my desk, earned the wrath and eternal dislike of the teacher, and when I complained and asked to be put in a higher-level class, was told that I had to solve my "interpersonal problems" with the teacher myself and that this catfight was further proof I didn't belong in a real science class.
And people wonder why there are so few women in the sciences.
(Incidentally, for someone who shouldn't be bothering her pretty little head with all that numbers-and-science shit, I seem to be doing pretty well as a computer science major, and my freshman calculus professor is after me to join the math department. Go figure.)
I'm not saying stratification is uniformly a bad thing, because god knows I've suffered through classes that moved at the pace of the slowest student and it's not fun, just that it can have unintended consequences. Like, say, the arbitrators of who goes into what group being subject to human error and biased assumptions about their students.
While this might be a motivation thing, there is another point to be made: Kids that are getting money for grades are less likely to need to get jobs to buy all the junk they want. After school jobs might be good experience, but I suspect that focusing more on education might be better.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is only true if segregation is done by age as well as by ability. If a third-grader is in math class with mostly sixth-graders, history class with fifth-graders, and Spanish class with mostly first-graders, he's not going to think, "Oh, I'm a hopelessly dumb kid." Likewise the sixth-grader who's in Spanish class with mostly third-graders, history class with fifth-graders, and math class with fourth-graders isn't going to be stuck with a bunch of people with no motivation and no study skills. He's going to be surrounded by students of all types--some of them very bright, some of them not so bright--but who all have a solid grasp of the prerequisites required for the material at hand.
Unfortunately, it's a bootstrapping problem. If everybody is in classes with people their own age, then for one person to be "held back" and put with younger kids (or to be advanced a year and put with older kids) is a social disaster. But if every class has a wide range of ages to begin with, there's not such a huge stigma attached to being one of the older or younger kids in the class.
~ roscivs
Interesting you should bring that up. I'm about to retire from lifelong service under the federal Civil Service Retirement System. I'm one of the last group hired under CSRS nearly 30 years ago before the system was scrapped and a hybrid system more closely resembling private industry was put in place.
Back during the dotcom bubble, I was (I've since moved on) a reasonably competent sysadmin in an all-Unix environment. Not a fortnight passed that I didn't turn down a job offer for at least double my salary. Some were willing to pay me 5 times my salary. Of course, those guys all wanted me to work 100 hours a week and carry a pager, to boot. I had no idea if any of them were going to be in business in 5 years. I turned them all down.
In a few months (or 5 years, depending on how our current reorg goes), I'll be retired. I'll have good (not great, but good) life, health, and long-term care insurance for the rest of my life. After deductions and assuming a frugal lifestyle, I'll get a small pension that amounts to, based on my projections, about 110-130% of my expenses. I have a few hundred grand in savings but I don't actually need any of that to live.
I got to this point via a willingness to delay gratification in exchange for stability and long-term viability. Y'see, when I was in my early 20s, I was unemployed for a couple of years. I felt like a leech. I was consumed with guilt for not pulling my weight. When I got a job, I was damn well going to keep it come hell or high water. As a result of that attitude, I've been willing to take the safe course and it's worked out reasonbly well for me.
My point is that I reject the notion that offering a generous retirement is necessarily a bad deal for the government and for society. The government has saved a bunch of money via my willingness to accept below-market-rate salaries over the last quarter century. Now they get to pay my pension with less valuable, post-inflation dollars. Not a bad deal for them, for me, or for any young person who can see themselves in their old age. It's too bad that such systems are gone now; I think they could still serve a valuable function.
While I agree with you, another poster brought up the issue that this could create a class of people that have serious entitlement issues.
I had great parents to help me get perspective but a great many students out there don't have parents that are as involved as they should be.
I wonder if you would just let the real-world teach them about entitlement when they get out of school as they is going to be a harsh reality almost no matter what. Of course I could see that leading down a very dangerous road where people that couldn't become successful turned to crime but that's not really any different than the situation we have now.
No, I didn't just coast in school. I hated school. I already knew how to read by the time I started kindergarten, and could even write a bit and do some addition and subtraction. Having to go from reading the newspaper after my father was done with it to singing the alphabet song was intolerable. I hated being spoon-fed scraps of knowledge that I could have obtained on my own given time and free access to a library. I resented being forced to associate with children with whom I had nothing in common but the fact that we were of a similar age. I resented being told to leave a task unfinished just because "it was time" to move on to something else.
In answering your second charge, that I saw no inherent value in education, I could follow Mark Twain's lead and distinguish between education and schooling. However, I will not do so. As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as inherent or intrinisic value. Knowledge and education have no value to me unless I can put it to use.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
"You create a lot of possibility of gaming the system by making the tests standardized, graded by a machine, and having basic cheat avoidance like multiple versions of a test." Fixed that for you.
You are criticizing the data by asserting your opinion about things that are in no way relevant to TFA. TFA was simply about answering one question: Do financial incentives increase test scores?
Your assertions might be correct, but I suspect that you are just parroting some stereotype you have heard and decided to keep as the soap-box of the day. As for your assertion that achievement tests have gotten easier over the past twenty years, do you have any information comparing today's students and today's curricula with those of twenty years ago? I have done a quick search on the subject and found little other than people shrugging their shoulders, comparing us with foreign nations (which says nothing about whether we have backslid, or if they have improved), or people just yelling out opinions and expecting everyone else to believe it because it is the favored myth of the day.
It was a practice on the Catholic high school I studied (Santo Antonio Maria Zaccaria - Rio de Janeiro - Brazil) to pay an amount of money equal the value of the monthly fee for the three "best qualified" students in the classroom. But it didn't help most 'average people' to get best grades, only the ones that already studied very hard cared to be on the ranks ;)
Better yet... if we actually take this study accurately.
(understand... this is a BIG IF... and everything below is premised on it)
If paying kids 500 bucks is a genuine increase in the student's performance... then isn't this more effective than hiring better teachers or even paying teacher's more?
When's the last time paying teacher's more money or another bureaucratic change resulted in a 40% increase in student performance?
Sounds to me like we can start cutting teacher salaries.
I know that's not the conclusion many want to draw from such a study... yet give it a ponder.
Also, remember to teach the Alphas and the Betas to share the fucking "pie" once in awhile too. That would help.
Finance theory as found in the textbooks is what led us into the financial mess we're in now. Short term profit is definitely good, but it is not the only thing that should be considered. Shit, just look at HP. Cut the cost of development and product manufacturing by using less costly and inferior methods saves a shit-ton of cash and makes a lot of money over your 18 months. What happens after that, though? When people start realizing that the printers will fall apart after 3 months of use? You've just saved cash by spending your corporate good name, which means that next time around people won't buy your stuff. That doesn't matter to the ??O's who jump ship after a couple years with a golden parachute, but it sure as hell drives any kind of quality or sustainability into the ground. And it leaves us in the financial mess we're in where stock prices are starting to reflect actual value companies have.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I don't give a shit why they learn, as long as they do it.
Yes but it isn't just that they are learning it is WHAT they are learning?
Are they actually developing good thinking and cognitive skills or are they studying to a test? Will they continue to learn even outside of school? Will what they learn actually stick around?
I suspect that it does help learning some but I also suspect that the learning done is heavily geared towards taking/getting through tests which often does not translate well to real-world performance.
Oh, yes... the Fake Breast Inspectors.
I consider these jobs highly predatory. They take advantage of kids in a vulnerable state as those kids need the cash to fund their schooling. And then, these jobs work the kids to a degree that it affects studying. That's why a lot of people are willing to take out student loans and pay it all back when they get a real job. The problem is, flipping burgers makes no sense, and many jobs college kids can get pays $9~15/hr tops, and has nothing to do with their field of study what so ever. Yet, those kind of jobs are the only ones they can get most the time. There's nothing the college kids can do.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
At the risk of getting -1 Offtpic by being a little too meta ... Flamebait? Really? Who are these mods who throw Flamebait and Troll around at perfectly decent Slashdotters? I don't see any Flamebaiting in the parent comment. Overratedness maybe, but not Flamebaiting. Whichever mod threw a Flamebat at Vancorps, fess up and explain yourself, or may you be subject to the merciless judgment of meta-moderation!
These are fourth and fifth graders however. They don't tend to think about growing up, other than fireman or princess, and even then, it's not a realistic "how do I become this" it's a, "Wow, these guys are cool, can we get a fire poll, can we dad, canwecanwecanwe!!!!". However, if you promise them cash, something tangible that they can see right then, of course they are going to see that as an instant reward, and try to achieve that.
Xaotik Designs
When I first started home schooling my son, I went into a 'home school store' where they were giving a little seminar on how to legally home school. After it was over, the owner of the store came over and talked to me. I had flagged her as a wacko when she tried to convince me that the school system was specifically designed to do exactly what you describe. Since then, those that have tried to convince me that home schooling is a bad idea, almost always end up falling back on the whole "but kids need to 'socialized' to fit into society" line of reasoning. It's a little creepy how the general public whole heartily agrees with the "wackos".
Yes, debilitating long term effects like teaching children that if they work hard and do well, they will be rewarded. Oh the horrors!
The only problem I see is if the reward is only tied to "working hard" and divorced from "doing well". THAT is when you run into problems like my generation has (Gen Why)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The real problem is that in the real world, it's dog eat dog and you will get screwed, cheated, defrauded, and otherwise given raw deals unless you fight for your life.
Lawyers, doctors, and other professions that hold your life in their palms get paid shitloads of money because you can't live without them. This reduces flexibility and allows them to demand top dollar.
Is is more effective. Furthermore, some parents have already got the message as well and have started using this technique themselves. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I've been a long time reader of Slashdot and held off on most comments, because the topic of discussion is often beyond my area of expertise, I'd feel out of place trying to add an intellectual comment on a topic I'm not adequately informed in. However, this is one that as a long time educator I am comfortable with. For those wanting to know more about the source of the problem, below is a rough overview:
1) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is passed as Federal Legislation. Requiring States to reach increasingly higher levels in Math & Reading (Overview: http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/ayp203/edlite-slide001.html)
2) School are forced to track and improve at a state level.
3) Each year the target grows (eventually reaching 100% by 2014), school that fail to meet this Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) are penalized.
4) Each year it is tougher for schools to reach the target on these Assessment tests, thus they risk losing money if students don't perform.
5) Article is linked on Slashdot regarding students getting paid for performance, those reading it closely will see that it's due to the NCLB & AYP requirements.
As a school, a lost student is 4-8 thousand dollars of lost revenue, so paying $500 or $250 per student to insure that they meet AYP and continue receiving their larger revenue is a short term business decision to survive a flawed piece of Federal (unfunded) legislation.
I'm not defending what the school is doing, but the biggest problem is getting students who don't care about tests or school to care about THIS test, as for many schools we are far enough into the program that they are facing penalties for not making AYP. If you can find a way to motivate students, who have the ability, but not desire, to do well on a federally mandated assessment, the schools would love to listen. I can assure you most schools have tried all the common sense means and smaller tricks to motivate these kids. Just one more example of big government trying to run things from DC without really understanding the long term ramifications of their decisions.
I'm not in favor of strict divisions, but there's a limit to the acceptable stretch in one class. There's a reason we don't put all grades together and say "let's learn math today". It's painful for them as they realize they're really holding the class back, it's painful for those that just want to speed ahead and can't help dumb ones because study habits isn't the problem. I remember once in a group work the four brighest of us were allowed to work on a project. It ran so many circles around the rest the teachers never let us do that again. You're right in that we all turned out decent enough despite the school. But I kinda wish I had gone to a school that was for the pupils, even the bright ones.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're both right. You eliminate some possibilities and create others. Judging which is best is the truly hard part.
People do things when they are motivated. Escalating the motivation from "look! I got an A!" to "Look! I got $400!" is logical when you consider American culture hates intelligence but loves greed. In the end though you're still teaching kids to jump through hoops to get a carrot. Sit down. Be quiet. Trust Authority. Remember your place. Be a Jock, Nerd, Loser, Pick-a-clique. The kids who win in the end are the ones who some how learn to be passionate and self motivated despite school.
^I second. Same here. 6 years to do electrical and biomedical engineering joint major. Had to do 4 coops/internships to pay the bills, plus rent, tuition, transportation, food, books, you name it, all while writing conference papers and doing side work to boost the resume. To everyone out there that thinks that university is for a bunch of elitists that know nothing of the real world, between my coops and the business I ran on my own *while attending university*, you're just trying to justify why you're always at the bottom of the callback list for job interviews. The fact of that matter is, for those of us graduating with a REAL degree, we have the hands-on and theory aspects to the job, and will always come out on top. For those of you don't like the fact that others get ahead of you "because of some damn useless degree", try busting you butt for over half a decade on 20 hours of sleep a week and total stress around the clock for your engineering/science/math degree, rather than doing a 2 year environmental studies diploma "program" while baked and tanked out of your mind.
Oh come on... all white people are just rolling in money and pay for things like college with pocket change. Especially the white men. Didn't you know that?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Nicely biased article stub.
The learning done and the benefit of the money is taken for granted, the article is merely proof of a fore-gone clonclusion,
Critics are put down directly as people who don't know an obvious fact.
And to top it off we have a nice cut kid smiling with some dollars. Isn't it nice to know that she is worth that much money?
Van? Van Wilder? Is that you?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Remembering back to my years in school, I can agree, it's not the money you pay them, it's the effective ness of the teachers, and there were many teachers who were only there because they were too old to fire, and of course, were way over paid due to their time teaching at the school...
Xaotik Designs
Yes, but that's the point - a PhD in robopsychology helps you distinguish silicon from silicone with greater certainty.
Ezekiel 23:20
Before I answer I have to say that we're getting into specifics which blurs the macro effect: applying these types of mechanical conditions to children, especially small children, will embed patterns into their minds that will be difficult to out-grow. You can grow out of "in bed by 10pm", but giving you material compensation for what you should realize is inherently for your benefit (education), will make you stop want to practice "educating yourself" once that compensation is gone.
To your question: Kids won't get fired from school. They aren't effected by the economy in this program. If a child does well they will continue to get paid, which is a parody compared to the real world. They don't have to seek promotion, they keep traveling though a linear path (think 1950s-style employment). They don't have to "find a job at another school". But most importantly, the environment is artificial. The difference is between real life, and a game.
What happens when that child grows up and the reward system becomes chaotic? You can be a hard, studious worker, and still get laid off. You have to develop communication and social skills to get a job and keep it. In an artificial environment, they just need the grades, and they can completely ignore their surroundings.
And one last "perk": imagine a child from a poor family. Suddenly attention is placed on the child to earn income at an extremely early age in order to provide for their family. When placed in a situation like that, where they might need to get good grades in order to feed and clothe their siblings, what's the difference between that and child labor?
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Here's the problem I see with this.
The school I went to had 1000 students.
Assume this works great and grades go up.
It would suddenly be in the school's best financial interest to reduce the grades of top students to prevent the pay-out of 500,000/yr.
This is something parents can do, but don't ask the school boards to pay for it, because it'll harm them. Do you know how many teachers $500,000 will buy?
It's been a long time.
Cute and snarky literary reference aside, you have exactly nailed the problem. Whether you call them Alphas, Betas, and Deltas or not, the hard fact is that everyone is not above average in intelligence.
A society that can not figure out how to engage (not "take care of") the folks that fall on the left hand side of the bell curve is going to have a heckuva lot of people that have nothing to lose by trashing that society. And further in a technological society, the "intelligence" of automated systems can move leftwards on that same bell curve making ever more intelligent people (to use an English term) redundant.
So, at what point will the number of unengaged people be likely to rise up and destroy society? Bear in mind that as the number of folks marginalized increases they will attract brighter people who see more to be gained by leading the "losers" against society rather than finding their own place within it.
I was going to provide current examples of reasonably smart people who have decided to lead the less intellectually inclined for their own personal gain, but my purpose is not to start a flame war on a side issue.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Although I'm sure that kids these days aren't consciously rationalizing it as such, they must, on some level, be recognizing that a good education isn't as straight a path to success as it once was. The real problem is the growing deficit in quality jobs. After observing so many well educated adults work so hard just to cover the basics, is it any wonder that kids need to be bribed to give a shit?
In any case, it's more about who you know, than what you know. For right or wrong, bullshitting and networking are the skills to have. And kids don't need much motivating to work on those skills. They'll work on them for free. And they have more tools than we ever did to help them out there.
Interesting, wouldn't you say?
Bullshit.
It's a well known fact that kids imitate each other to feel accepted.
I've got you beat: I was on the 8 year plan.
I'm not surprised. Oddly enough, some of the highest grades I got in my entire educational career were [1] in grad school, when I was paying my own way through, and [2] in taking continuing education classes required to keep my teacher certification--in which case I not only would have had to pay for the class if I had failed, but I could also have lost my teacher certificate.
As a former high school sysadmin, I was responsible for printing and distributing mid-quarter progress reports from our Basmati-based grading system. It was a pretty simple Access form that would sort the reports by fourth-period teacher.
Sure enough, one day after school, I find sitting on a table in the library: tape, scissors, scraps of paper, and copies of progress reports. A student had managed to cut grades off another progress report, tape them in place, copy it, and fool both her guidance counselor and her church, which was paying $5 per 'A' on progress reports.
I gave all the evidence to the assistant principal for curriculum. I think there's a special place in hell for people like this.
...is the 40% increase. That's a huge number. It means the kids are capable of performing 40% higher than they currently are; they just fail to do so because they don't give a rat's ass about the tests. What I wonder is whether kids in other countries aren't already performing closer to their "theoretical max"? That is to say, U.S. kids don't under-perform their international peers solely due to a difference in ability, but also because of a difference in "giving a rat's ass about the tests".
The education system isn't about education. It's about penal reform.
When kids are born, their instinctive emotional responses, their ability to be idealistic, and their ability to believe that they can change things for the better, are all intact, because at first they don't know better. I remember one example during my first or second year at school when I didn't want to engage in some of the activities we were doing in class; that was when the dichotomy began to be imprinted, between what I wanted, and what everyone else wanted me to do.
The entire purpose of the education system is to beat anything out of a child that doesn't conform, and this economic program could just be seen as getting the proverbial indentured servitude started that much earlier. The bastards at the top of the heap actually prefer beginning to indoctrinate kids as young as they can, because they know the truth of the words of Uncle Joe. "Give me a child until he is 5 years old, and you may do what you will with him thereafter."
During school, kids get allotted the place in the social hierarchy which they very often occupy for the rest of their lives, and God help you if you're not inherently an athlete with around a 130 IQ. You actually ironically don't want to be far above 130, though; because virtually nobody else is, so if you are, it just makes you look like a freak.
The education system for me was purely about psychological survival, and I very nearly didn't survive; I spent two months in a psychiatric inpatient unit after leaving, and probably another six months in outpatient therapy after that. I went very close to insanity.
'Even if they are getting better grades, it is developing a sense of entitlement, which will be far more damaging than bad grades in the future. The world in general seems to already suffer from an overdose of self-entitlement.'
You may be right. But none of that has anything to do with school. Schools are not to mold your children into anything good or bad. Schools are to impart a knowledge of logic, history, mathematics, science, language, etc. Making the child they impart that knowledge upon a decent person is the parents problem.
"It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven.
Umm how about this- it has nothing to DO with ego. Your kids aren't as dumb as you think, and a loooong time ago they realized that the shiny gold star you used to give them was worth exactly jack plus shit.
Give kids a REAL reward (money) for work, and guess what- they come through.
>While I don't agree with this program, I do agree that kids need to see the immediate benefits
>of education. Kids in poor cities do worse in school, and it's no surprise why: Everyone they
>see around them is poor. When all you see is poverty, you give up hope of rising above it.
>And once you've given up on your dreams, education seems like a waste of time. Why bother
>succeeding in school if you're destined to work in a crappy job for low pay.
I agree with you here.
>I think the answer lies in changing the way we teach. You don't need to think in order to get
>good grades in today's schools. You only need to memorize, study, and bullshit your way through
>school. Paying kids for grades will only encourage them to get better at taking tests and spewing
>out facts and definitions. It doesn't mean they actually understand the material, or care about it.
Then alter the standardized tests to check the metric you are actually interested in. This is a separate issue from paying students who achieve the metric.
>We need to show kids the benefit of education... but we also need to teach the intrinsic value of
>education and the joy of thinking. I think the best way for students to learn both lessons is to
>get experience doing real work where they get to think for themselves, make decisions, and become
>a valued member of a team. Experience learning. They can see the benefits of having a rewarding
>job where you feel valued, while learning to think on their feet and become leaders. When I went
>to college, I had a class in public relations where teams of students were paired up with local
>non-profits, and had to create a pr campaign for them. It was the hardest thing I ever did in
>school, but I learned more in that class than I ever did in all 4 years of high school.
I don't know that you can teach the value of they joy of anything. As they say, there's no accounting for taste, and what one person finds joyful someone else may not.
Nonetheless, if you desire to reward students for their ability to think, make decisions, and be a team member, then you need to alter the test metrics. Again, this is a separate issue from paying those who achieve the metric.
>What I'm saying is, paying kids is nice, but if you really want them to learn, get them involved in
>what their learning. Instead of drilling kids on the menus in microsoft word, how about we let them
>explore computers on their own in a supervised environment. Lets have more science experiments and less
>science quizzes. It will unlock the benefits of education right away, while teaching them how to
>learn on their own. They will learn lessons they'll never forget.
The trick is developing a metric that can measure the success or failure of teaching those things.
Personally, I'm not to terribly put out with the metric I was put to when I was in school, the SAT. You can either do the math or you can't, and you either comprehend English or you don't.
If you want to come up with a similar metric that captures the student's ability and/or desire to think, I'm fine with that.
In short, I'm less concerned with the metric as I am with coming up with ways to motivate kids to achieve the metric. Once you've mastered the latter, the former can be whatever you want it to be.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yep. And if you take several idiots they are likely to band together and start bullying other kids. Until other kids start imitating idiots.
A well known fact.
Or 'the idiot kid' might become an outcast.
PS: it's OK to mix kids of uneven capabilities, but they should not be VERY uneven.
As long as there is a strong emphasis that one's position in life is within their own control, and that the rules are fair (at least, in school) to ensure upward (and downward) mobility, I have no problem with stratifying students. Yes, this exposes some uncomfortable truths, like: children with active parents are more likely to do well in school; children in financially-comfortable families can better focus on their studies. But the fact is, this is how the world works, and children need to learn that lesson someday. Penalizing the motivated students by catering to the least common denominator is the worst possible solution to this problem! And teaching the class at the level of the motivated students hurts the less-capable students, because, even if they are motivated, they may have no way to get up to speed on their own.
In the real world, your fate is in your own hands, but the rules aren't fair. Never were, and probably never will be. I think it is a great disservice to our children to pretend like this problem doesn't exist. In the US, we seem to have this major inability to differentiate between what should be and what is. We need to prepare children for what is.
Survival of the most fit. What's wrong with giving the best advantages to the kids who can make the most of it? Is there some nobility to having a world full of mediocre achievers?
Putting "dumb"kids in class with "smart" kids limits the heights to which the smart kids can grow. Putting emotionally or psychologically deficient kids in class with normal kids is disruptive to the normal kids. Do you think the smart/normal kids want the dumb/deficient kids in their class? Of course not.
But guess what? The dumb/deficient kids don't want to be there either. These dumb/deficient kids would much prefer to be in classes with others that are more like them, so they can feel "normal" by comparison with their peers, and receive the appropriate teaching methodologies at a comfortable rate that allows them to feel a sense of accomplishment they otherwise could never achieve when mixed in with kids far above their intelligence.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Once you are working most jobs look at previous experience and how well rounded of an individual you are. A 4.0 gpa doesn't help when you are leading a group and those are the jobs that pay really well.
"Putting the dumb kids in one class would only pigeon hole those kids. They would be made fun of at school, and systematically taught that they are not as good as the other kids. Whoever ends up teaching "the dumb class" would naturally have low expectations for these supposedly helplessly dumb students, and as we all know, teachers teach worse when their expectations are low. So your plan would help the kids who are already smart, while ruining the lives of kids who need the most help."
How is this a negative thing exactly? People, despite how much we'd like to believe so, are not created equal. You are right in the effect that such a segregation would have, but I challenge your assumption that the effect is a bad thing for society.
The future of our race and generation isn't driven by the lowest common denominator - my bus on the way to work is. The future is driven by the brightest individuals of our time. You can cut their electricity to squeeze the little bit of light out of the rest of the bulbs, but you can get much more light if the one bright bulb got what it needed.
And I also challenge your opinion that such a system would 'ruin' the lives of kids who 'need help'. First off, whatever happened to survival of the fittest? Second, dumb people are quite capable of ruining their own lives with little or no intervention from society. In fact, they are likely to do so regardless of how much resources society devotes to them, so why waste the resources? The issue is one of a return on investment, and the return to society as a whole is much better if we pick out the best and brightest and allow them to excel.
And we aren't even talking about devoting drastically more resources for the smart kids - the best thing about them is that they will learn as much as they can regardless of the tools given to them, you don't need to push anything on them - its just taking them out of the general populous and giving them teachers that recognize the ability of their students. They don't need aides and fancy computers and new books - they need teachers that know the subject and know how to teach it. THAT is the biggest problem of all - everything else is secondary.
Financial incentives work - pay the teachers more and you'll attract better teachers. Everything else is secondary. And, as Europe has shown us for some time now, paying students to learn works exceedingly well â" that is why European students get a free education and get a stipend when they do well in school. So not only does everyone get a chance to get a higher education, those that exceed in their field are even compensated for it. Its quite clear then why American students are falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world. We gained our world dominance through technological superiority, and our poor educational system is allowing this superiority to fly out the window, perhaps forever.
PS. There is no evidence that Iâ(TM)ve found that putting less bright kids with smart kids improves the slower onesâ(TM) learning abilities. In fact, I would imagine they get very discouraged when they see that others around them are so much better at academics, naturally. And I ESPECIALLY see no evidence that even if the above were the case, the positive effects of it would offset the negative effects of a student in a class that is too easy or too difficult for him or her.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
And pigeonholing the dumb ones is bad how? In 20 years they're going to be supported by the ~5% of students that are on the advanced track anyway.
And even without corruption it isn't as if a grade actually reflects how well the material was learned. Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher. Teachers reward those who repeat what the book rather than those who demonstrate actual understanding of the material.
Yes, there would be a lot of problems doing this with grades, but why is that relevant? It says in the summary that they pay according to tests. I understand about not RTFA, but not reading TFS? That's just taking lazyness to a new level.
Isn't that the point? If they worked hard they wouldn't have to be made fun of. It's a great incentive.
Inevitably the loudest complainers about everyone else's poor education are the blowhards who clearly paid little attention in school themselves.
regulated -> relegated
as -> since
who's -> whose
dead beat -> deadbeat
I know, I know... "Its jussed an off the cuff coment, in reel life wear it count's, my grammer is inpeckable."
Ok, we get it, you're smart and resent being stuck in the same class with the stupid smelly brown people. But that's not what's wrong with our Education system, that's just what made it unpleasant for you.
While I may have a low opinion of home-schooling I don't think it is wrong, with the right parents it can give a kid a great education but there's no falling back on the "kids need to be socialized" argument. It is a valid concern with home schooling and often does result in adults that are not well adjusted. That doesn't mean its impossible for a home schooled child to be well adjusted as there are plenty of success stories out there as evidence. Sports and other out of school social engagements have often been used with great success to supplement the lack of peer interaction. Of course there are plenty of failures so you can't fault people for being skeptical.
Both methods have their problems, if a parent understands their responsibility then more power to them as there is a chance they could do a better job. A friend of mine back home was home-schooled by his wacko religious fanatical mother and it didn't turn out so well even though he was a smart kid. After a few years of rebelling and getting away from his mother he has evened out quite a bit even though he is still a bit awkward.
Of course I went through public school and still ended up awkward until a few years of college and work life straightened me out which is why I don't have a problem with home schooling in general as neither method guarantees any result.
Exactly right, you can watch the decline of a countries education as these PC ideas take hold:
You forgot:
#4 - demotivated reachers
#5 - employers who say they now need more H1Bs
I knew a few people who had low paying jobs like lecture scribe, librarian assistant, or campus bus driver just to pay for expenses other than housing and tuition. Even though that's not exactly paying for school, it goes a long way towards alleviating the financial pain on the family.
To do list for Windows
Oh, right. Let's bring our children up in a communist educational system where everyone works to varying degrees to get the exact same reward, and then just throw them into a capitalist society. Or do you do work for free?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Now teachers are being asked to change diapers for kids who's dead beat parents never bothered to teach how to use a toilet.
...excepting of course the special needs kids in the world, right? Use caution painting every child with any brush at all. They're each different people, and the generalizations don't usually work when they're that large.
In the USA public education is now just used as a tool for political indoctrination. With extremists at both ends vying to brainwash children.
This isn't just a 'now' thing. These have always been stated purpose of the education system since it was created. Another fine slashdot discussion led me to this site, which you really have to read immediately:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
School is a religion. Without understanding the holy mission aspect you're certain to misperceive what takes place as a result of human stupidity or venality or even class warfare. All are present in the equation, it's just that none of these matter very muchâ"even without them school would move in the same direction. Dewey's Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897 gives you a clue to the zeitgeist:
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.
What is "proper" social order? What does "right" social growth look like? If you don' know you're like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.
1897, dude.
You do bring up very valid points here. That is quite a strong argument there and I don't disagree with you on any particular point.
The question: Is your predicted outcome better, worse, or the same as the system we currently have in place? I honestly don't know the answer to that question as I do see an upside but you are right in that they are sheltered from the other harsh realities of the business world so we perhaps shouldn't endeavor make learning environments similar to business environments.
As for child labor, while I think such a scenario could arise I don't see it as a negative thing as it encourages the children to do their work and get good grades which is something apathetic parents wouldn't have bothered with encouraging before and poor but well intentioned parents would see great satisfaction at their child doing well enough in school to help out with the family.
In all scenarios there are those that would abuse the situation but I do feel like that would be fewer than the number of children victimized by parents that don't value education currently.
I actually think there is some utility in making the brightest kids learn how to coexist with the kids who aren't so bright. Out in the real world (you know, the place the education system is preparing kids to live and work), you don't get to avoid interacting with people who aren't as bright as you are. Where are you going to learn how to do it if not in school?
I did my share of grunt work in school, and I remember hating it. I also remember rushing through it once, getting a crap grade and learning the important lesson that even grunt work needs to be done properly. That lesson has served me well in my working life. I've met people who have never learned it. They are often "stuck" in their career- they can't suck it up and do the grunt work that is needed to advance to the next level. That is fine if they are happy with the situation, but they often aren't. Personally, I'm glad I learned my lesson in the 6th grade, when the penalty was not coming first in math class, and not in the workplace, when the penalty is a hefty difference in pay and workplace satisfaction.
Now, our public schools might not be doing the best job of juggling all the competing requirements put on them. We ask them to educate kids with a wide range of capabilities. We can and should try to fix that. But I don't buy your statement, put forth without argument, that stratifying kids is the way to do it.
Grunt work and brain work are both valuable.
The problem is that we are teaching the grunt workers that their job is to shoulder the geniuses.
What needs to be done is to make labor and hard work honorable again.
i guess i'm the odd man out...I found great jobs in my subject area. I worked for NeXT in the day and did DB work for a local dept. Both turned out to be great experiences, paid great, i got an office and the killer parking pass of my dreams (i literally double parked for semesters, it was crazy!).
the moral of the story, good jobs are out there, you just have to hunt for them.
I had a home-schooled co-worker several years ago. I only knew because I was part of the interview and hiring team. He seemed like a nice person and I never had any problems dealing with him, but he was definitely less social than all my other co-workers. He was competent at his job, polite to others, but overall just didn't participate in general cubicle banter. I didn't mind, but I know a few other people thought he was snubbing them.
/end random tangent
All of this reminds me of one particular day in Poly/Sci when a student who was clearly incapable of following any aspect the lesson, kept interrupting and finally thought he'd be cute and ask the professor, "Why do I need to know this stuff, anyway?"
The prof's response made him an instant hero:
"You don't . . . the world will always need fry cooks. Now get up and leave."
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
So they didn't do well at these tests, and now they do. We know they can learn the test, so now we change the test for the better and see if they keep up.
My webcomic
No, in most cases, being made fun of makes you feel like you aren't worth anything, and then you stop trying. Only in very few cases does it motivate someone to work harder. Case in point: fat people get made fun of every day. But it doesn't motivate them to lose weight. It makes them sad, which makes them eat, which makes them get fatter.
Survival of the most fit. What's wrong with giving the best advantages to the kids who can make the most of it? Is there some nobility to having a world full of mediocre achievers?
Putting "dumb"kids in class with "smart" kids limits the heights to which the smart kids can grow. Putting emotionally or psychologically deficient kids in class with normal kids is disruptive to the normal kids. Do you think the smart/normal kids want the dumb/deficient kids in their class? Of course not.
But guess what? The dumb/deficient kids don't want to be there either. These dumb/deficient kids would much prefer to be in classes with others that are more like them, so they can feel "normal" by comparison with their peers, and receive the appropriate teaching methodologies at a comfortable rate that allows them to feel a sense of accomplishment they otherwise could never achieve when mixed in with kids far above their intelligence.
You completely ignore the reality that many supposedly dumb kids are potential smart kids with no motivation to improve, because everyone around them tells them they are hopelessly dumb, and all their dumb friends think it's cool to be dumb.
In the USA public education is now just used as a tool for political indoctrination.
Having to come out of the closest here and admit that I am not all that old, I just graduated high school about a week ago.
Having said this, you might need to readjust your tinfoil hat. The more radical or political a teacher is the less students pay attention to them. Sure, some teachers try, but they forget that students rarely pay attention to anything the teacher says anyway. And in our community (which is fairly representative of nearly every community these days) the teachers are hated with such an unrelenting, illogical venom that any sign of political bias will get nailed by the local press or complaining helicopter parents. It has happened here and resulted in the sacking of more than one teacher.
Political brianwashing simply does not happen. Even if students are tested on their political views for the class, they just regurgitate whatever the teacher said an hour before and forget about it. This is how middle and high school works now - unless the student has a vested interest in the material and views it of some value (which usually only occurs in the honor classes, speaking from personal experience) then no "learning" or "brainwashing" occurs. Political leaning is a good way to turn ears off.
The problem with paying for grades is that it takes No Child Left Behind even further - it now gives a solid price for cheating and "teaching to the test".
Before you started paying kids, it was just about teachers' rewards - like pay incentives and keeping their jobs. IIRC in some districts teachers' cheating approached 30% (I could be wrong on this; read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics.)
Now you've put a solid price on cheating.
In my experience, the best people on the job aren't those who got the best grades, it's the ones who overcame more than others, who demonstrated true effort. I can tell you stories aabout the penniless kids who boostrapped themselves from Harlem, or Mexico, or Eastern Europe. They make the best employees; they work hard, they value work, and they strive for improvement. Heck, I've had work crews get pissed because I told them they couldn't work on Thanksgiving.
So rewarding kids for grades has put a solid price on cheating, and will eventually result in kids saying: Pay me or I won't go to school.
Heinlein lampooned this in Stranger in a Strange land; perhaps those giving out money should actually read some literature.
I really would love to see a statistical analysis of the kids' tests.
I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.
In fact, I'd probably fail most 7th grade exams.
The subject matter is pretty specific, even in 7th grade. Even a book I did read in 7th grade English class, now, is all but forgotten. If it was a book I enjoyed, I might remember, vaguely, the plot. Most English books stunk and I remember nothing of them.
Essentially everything I learned in school was to earn a piece of paper that said, 'This guy has a degree'. Even in my major, in college, the majority of what I learned had no use in my day-to-day activities as an adult. I studied mainframes programming languages in college. JCL, COBOL, ASM, a class in C. My first job out of college was programming in .Net - something I picked up from books while going to school.
I'd go so far as to say the *vast majority* of students are not learning for any particular reason at all. In the lower grades, they do what they are told. By college, most of the students, particularly the ones that are going to graduate - have selected a major that is going to lead to a job that will both pay their bills and be tolerable.
As I said. The home school "wackos" and the public school "general public" describe the public school systems goals to be the same thing. Unfortunately academic education is not it.
critics argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone
Nobody learns just for the sake of learning. We learn to improve our condition; to develop better technologies, grow more food, and make life easier. Learning "for the sake of learning" would be a waste of a good mind. I think this program is a good idea. Giving kids more immediate rewards for getting their education will condition them to enjoy education more in the future and ensure that they are setting the proper foundation of knowledge for college and/or the workplace.
I always get worried when people are willing to discredit measurable metrics in order to promote the unmeasurable (e.g. thinking skills- what does that even mean?). I come from the old school of "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Most people are simply not willing to change their minds on anything- when presented with overwhelming evidence in support of the opposition, they will often resort to whatever crutch works rather than doing choosing the logical side. Often this crutch involves throwing away solid data in order to take a position that cannot be disproved (or proved).
There are winners and losers in this world, but everyone thinks they are a winner. 90% of people think their sense of humor is above average; 100% of newlyweds think they have no chance of getting a divorce. Testing is hated because not as much because it is an inaccurate measure of ability (it is, within limits), but because it pops the illusion every parent has that their child is wonderful.
My gym teacher made > 100k to teach kids to play softball and basketball. He was also the 'trainer' so I guess he was involved with the sports teams.
Gym teacher.
> 100k.
This is in a town where the median *household* income is 60k.
Just sayin....
Any student who fully understands the material taught in a class, at any level of education from K to Masters should receive an A in the class if the purpose of a class is for students to learn the material and the grade is a measure of how well they have learned it.
You're talking about a grade as a measure of knowledge, not a measure of learning. To measure learning, it's not enough to take a snapshot of what a student knows at any one time. Instead, to measure learning you have to keep track of the change in a student's abilities over time.
This experiment isn't about improving test scores, or even about teaching them the material in the 7th grade curriculum, but about turning the children on to learning and demonstrating how hard work can be rewarding. That's why the real results will only come in a few years' time when the researchers have some data about how the students do long term.
I'm all for it. I think they should post test scores publicly, create testing tournaments, and generally instill a more competitive nature to academics. Pit classes vs classes, boys vs girls, schools vs schools, districts vs districts. Students need more motivational programs in academics and more visible and immediate rewards for academic performance.
What if your class got a day off if it was the top performing class in your school?
What if your school got a day off if it was the top performing school in your district?
What if test scores were posted publicly and the top 20 performers earned a scaled payment?
What if the five most improved scores earned a bonus payment?
What if they handed out letterman jackets for academic performance?
What if you created a "testing" league, allowed schools to field teams, and created tournaments with instantly graded results?
Some of these may already occur with programs like Science Bowl or Knowledge Bowl, but we need to bring it to a larger number of students.
We need to change the teenage perception that being smart is not cool...
I mostly agree with you, but the "brown nose effect" is less if we are talking about standardized tests that aren't scored by the teacher.
It just encourages the kids to jump through the hoops and complete the busywork. Nothing of value is gained, kids still aren't learning anything useful. They're just filling in the bubbles whereas before they didn't take the time to do it.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
You mean that you're going to pay more money to the teachers that teach to the test rather than the ones that actually teach anything useful.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Part of the problem may be that important but difficult-to-measure factors are also involved. "Science" tends to ignore what is hard to measure (or tie to profits), such as "respectable brand name". But that does not mean that the ignored factors are not important to the outcome.
Similarly, economic equations that maximize average GDP may cause more bubbles via heavy leveraging of resources, money, and skills (churn-and-burn). Averages are generally easier to model than fluctuations.
It would be interesting to see an experiment to see if chiefs who are paid on long-term stock value do a better long-term job than those who are not. Hard data may be more convincing than gut feelings.
And I notice my organization keeps letting HP and MS trick them into spiral upgrade cycles using various gimmicks. Sometimes tomfoolery works, I hate to say. Organizations are not always rational. Con artists can make a buck. It's a complex issue, no doubt.
Table-ized A.I.
The problems with tests are well documented. For the sake of argument we'll ignore the kids who "don't test well".
Teachers teaching to the test is a very common problem. Teachers teach exactly what will be on a test and nothing more. This happened in my AP physics class in high school. The teacher would skip over very important concepts simply to tell us how to solve a common AP test problem. No education, simply "if you see this question, then plug these numbers into this formula and write the number you get on this line".
In this situation, kids don't learn a single goram thing. Measurable metrics would be absolutely wonderful to have, IF THEY FUCKING EXISTED WITHIN THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT. Unfortunately, they don't.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
Considering most kids don't actually care to learn just for education's sake, I'd say that's just fine.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Loans, student loans. I'm busting my ass during the summer working at a grocery store to get money mainly for rent/food. My tuition is partially funded my my parents (not much though), I'll be graduating with a very significant debt to pay off.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
You gave us the answer already. If a child is properly socially adjusted, he or she will immediately shun those peers who don't help the group in some way, and those peers will either learn to adjust or they will be left behind. Society is all about group function, and a classroom ought to be a reflection of that. The issue is that instead of allowing children to partake in a society inside the classroom the same way they would outside it and to punish each other for transgressions, we have raised the THINK OF THE CHILDREN banner to protect the outliers and denied the classroom society its ability to function normally. Then we put a harried, poorly educated single adult in front of the class and expect that adult to moderate everything in order to produce the same social outcomes that the class would naturally grow into on its own (with guidance, of course - and with proper modeling from the outside world. One more great reason to go on field trips and community service outings is to widen the range of social experiences a child has!).
Now, I don't advocate leaving kids behind just because they don't "fit in". I think everyone needs to have some place to fit... but if a child is having issues in a regular classroom it'd be nice if there were more alternatives than special education or juvenile detention centers. I've known kids who in 4th or 5th grade, having come from working-class homes, decided that they wanted to continue the blue-collar tradition. It's not a great choice but it would make a lot more sense to help the kid understand that by sending them out to apprentice themselves for a year with a tradesman or trade school (and maybe they will like it - and there's nothing wrong with training more plumbers and mechanics!) than it does to do what we currently do: "It's school! You NEED it! You'll never get by in the outside world with a 5th grade education, so shut up and do your homework!"
Education is the cornerstone of democracy and it's fantastic that we are setting our bar "high" (yeah, right) for our most precious resource - our future leaders. However, not everyone can be president. Why not encourage trade work and usable skills to help kids realize why reading and math are necessary, instead of pretending they're useless as long as they're students? As a side effect, I'm pretty sure kids who are proud of what they're doing in school ALSO get better grades, plus gain better understanding... and you don't have to bribe anyone!
When placed in a situation like that, where they might need to get good grades in order to feed and clothe their siblings, what's the difference between that and child labor?
Well, if you're going to put it that way...
When kids are just expected to get good grades because they're kids, required to spend 6 hours every day at school and then a couple more hours at night doing homework, with no say in the situation and without even being paid, what's the difference between that and child slavery?
(The only difference that comes to mind is that slave labor produces something of benefit: cotton, pyramids, etc. School labor only produces completed schoolwork: answers to questions whose answers are already known, essays that are thrown away after being graded, tests that serve only to change the letter that appears on a piece of paper at the end of the quarter.)
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I remember reading an interesting finance/economy related article about schooling. In brief, it said that schooling served a purpose of preventing young kids from entering the workforce and competing with adults. Specialized schooling was just another re-vamping of the guild system. The article over-simplified a lot of things (especially since it was written before the Internet took off), but I can't help thinking that there was a lot of truth in it.
Wait...did you really just say that rigid inflexible reward systems that can be gamed don't exist in the real world?
I'm tempted to think you're joking. But upon reflection, I suspect the reality is that you've merely had far better jobs at far better companies than most people.
The business world is chock full of idiotic mechanical evaluation metrics and reward systems - you can't tell me that you've never heard a story of some dumbass manager that had the brilliant idea to base wage increases on lines of code produced, leading to the inevitable arms race where everyone starts breaking up trivial statements into eight lines to stack their stats. Learning to game these systems like this is a very useful thing for most people, who will be leaving college and spending the rest of their lives in these types of jobs.
Even aside from that, I don't think it's wrong for kids to learn to expect compensation for work completed. I personally have found the attitude I had in school (learning for its own sake) to be a bit of a hindrance since I've left (esp. in the beginning), as I tended to undervalue my time as long as it was spent working on "interesting" things. The school attitude really hurt me, since it took quite a while after leaving to feel comfortable charging people appropriate rates for doing the type of thing I used to do in school for free.
I'm a high school student who just graduated last week. Tell me the value of what I have learned so far, if I don't understand it as you claim. What will my diploma accomplish? What can I do with it?
But more importantly, how can I succeed with the education I've received? That's what it boils down to, and by and large, the answer is, "You can't, at least not yet. You need to work even more." A high school education means absolutely nothing these days.
Blame the students, I guess, they're too dumb/stupid/interested in their cell phones to blame back. Is that how Slashdot runs these days?
I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.
Most would. Hmm. Now only if there were a game show to exploit this concept....
Most English books stunk and I remember nothing of them.
I quickly learned that it wasn't always the books that stunk, sometimes it was the teacher. Grade 7ish we had a short story anthology book that we read selected stories out of. I remember they were quite consistently bad, and hated that book.
One day, caught on a long bus ride and without other reading material (I'm the sort who will read cereal box ingredient lists in preference to doing nothing), I read one of the stories we hadn't been assigned, resigning myself to loathing it.
And it was quite good. Not great, certainly, but easily the best in the book so far. (I've actually tried to track it down since. Sadly, plot plus some basic dialogue is all I remember.) So I kept reading. And I was absolutely shocked to find Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel", amongst others, waiting for me in those pages the teacher never visited.
I finished the entire book before the end of the year, and I found that I could almost consistently predict which stories the teacher would pick from a given section just by picking the worst ones.
And then there was my Grade 10 teacher, who was, to quote TV Tropes, sure that everyone is Jesus in Purgatory. Heaven help you (no pun intended) if you handed in a book report that didn't insist that the titular characters of "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Lady of Shallot" were both Jesus dying for mankind's sins.
I had a few really good English teachers, I admit, but some of them made me realize why some kids were proud to be borderline illiterate.
I disagree with that as I did learn a lot in school that would later become very applicable in my life. I learned a lot about the different disciplines and I learned a lot about dealing with people that hate you for no reason.
I think a lot of modern office politicking can and is taught in school even though it isn't formally taught. All the regular disciplines, math, science, English, and social studies provided me with a very well rounded education allowing me to sail right into college and become immediately successful academically.
Just because some lessons are harder to articulate than others doesn't mean students aren't learning a lot in school. Academic education as you call it is also a goal, it's just not the only goal which seems to be the argument you have. That is why the freedom to school your own child is there, you are allowed to disagree and that's why the option still exists.
I went to a public school system that from Grade 1 thru 6 would split kids into different classes for Math and Reading. There were 4 teachers for each grade, so it was pretty easy. The top 25% of the readers would go to one classroom, the middle 50% would go to two classrooms, the bottom 25% would go to another room. (The percentages might vary from year to year, they weren't hard and fast). My mom was teacher in the school system and she explained it well a few years ago. Yes, the kids in the "slow classes" were known to everyone, but we didn't know HOW slow they were. It was much easier for a slow reader to summon up the courage to read aloud to the group when everyone else was having the same problems. It is much harder to summon up that courage when all the smart kids in the room giggle every time you open your mouth. The people who really worked were the teachers struggling to keep up with the advanced kids
I remember my sister coming home crying from 1st grade because "they stuck me in the lowest reading group". My mother inquired about what was going on. She assumed she was in the lowest reading group because they were using the reader that she used in November of her kindergarten year. Sure enough, she was in the advanced class, she was just really advanced. She ended up going to 3rd grade classes for reading and math. She socialized well with her peers because, although they knew she was smart, they didn't know how smart. She ended up double majoring in college, EE and Math.
...that merit pay for teachers is just around the corner? Heavens no - perish the thought!
As a father (and tax payer), I don't like the idea. There are high-minded philosophical issues I have with this, but on a more practical level, is this really what we want to do with our kids? And what happens when the payments stop (will they stop)? What's next, paying people for public service/volunteer work? (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/world/americas/02iht-campaign.4.14179758.html)
Ken
I suppose that the real answer is along the lines of: How do you define "better" and "worse"? (I know, this sounds like a cheap answer, I'll try to elaborate)
If you instill patriotism in children, do you consider that "better" than educating them about equality? The diplomatic answer is "you can educate both", but that's easily proven fallacious. Patriotism will push a child to believe that their nation, and the people of their nation, are "more equal than others", to quote Orwell. The same goes for capital/social poles.
There are patterns that are ingrained in us already. The question of whether or not this particular additional pattern will be "better" than the current state of things is up for debate, but one thing is certain: the change will be disruptive. I mean "disruptive" in the sense that society will gradually divide between those who were paid for their grades, and those who were not. The two mentalities will clash in some way.
Personally, and this is just my opinion at this point, this particular pattern is harmful from a cultural perspective. One should seek knowledge to better one's self -- not in exchange for material gain, or as competition (although competition is generally considered a positive driving force, it's not the *goal* of education to "beat out" the rest -- it's a means, not an end). This probably sounds like hippie-talk to some, but it's what I believe.
Placing the equation "earn grades = earn money" may sound like a good analogy for life, but in order to get these grades you're going to have to educate yourself. And again, once the motivation is removed, these children will find it comparatively unrewarding to seek knowledge, for knowledge sake. At this point, if you read along this thread, I'm sure you'll find many who will say "I only learn when there's something else to gain besides knowledge". I have to say, I find this surprising, seeing how this is slashdot.
It seems to me that it depends on what your fundamental personal views are. I tend to think that the progress of humans as a species is a priority, and that this progress isn't found in hedonism (hyperbole, I know, but you get the idea). Others may say that life is short, and you should seek pleasure where you can find it. I can't, in any specific way, refute that.
As for the child labor scenario, I suppose you could always find *some* upside. Just a century ago couples had more children so those the children can go to work and provide for the rest of the family. This is still true in the developing world. But should it be encouraged in a modern world?
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
To the present day businessman, nothing else matters but making money today.
Hate to break it to you, but, at the end of the day, that's the only thing that has EVER mattered to businessmen...present day or not.
I understand the anti-argument too. The problem is that if you let kids do poorly in school while trying to teach them about life, you end up ruining the rest of their entire life.
Teenagers generally have zero idea about the real world. I'm 31 and still have very little idea about the real world, but at least I know that I don't know much. At 18 I thought I knew everything. Luckily my parents forced me to do some things (and I met some of the right people) that were the right things to do long term.
This is slightly off topic, but speaks to how little kids know about the future. A friend of mines nephew has attention span issues. Smart kid, but needs to be pushed. So his parents scraped up the cash and put him in military high school where he excelled. The military then offered to put him through military college and send him to med school. All he had to do was give 4 years when he was done. So at 29 or 30 he would have been a medical doctor with ZERO debt, have had a ton of experience, and be out of the military. That was easily his best option at a future. When the day came to sign the papers (he's 18 now so his parents can't force it) he decided not to. His reasoning? He met some 16 year old on myspace and she lives 9 hours away from the school.
I say this by first acknowledging that I have pretty much every book Heinlein wrote. But please do not bring in his libertarian wank dreams into a discussion about what is real literature. Heinlein's ideas worked in his books because he rigged the stories so that they worked in his books. Period.
He spung a good tale, and I've worn out more than a few copies of his stuff as a kid. But basing your life decisions on what a grumpy old man who had problems deciding if he was a libertarian or a facist WISHED the world was like rather than actually view the world head on, is as bad as doing what you claim those people you are snidely insulting have screwed up on.
Discipline (bootstraping or whever else you want to call it), is simply motivation. Yes, some people in bad situations often get the motivation to better their place in society simply to avoid being stuck in that situation for the rest of their life.
But that isn't the ONLY motivation in life and frankly, if you think the only way someone can be motivated is to have a shitty childhood, I suggest you put down your Frank Miller comics and rejoin the rest of us in society.
No, GPA shouldn't be the only measurement of someone's value in life. And it's extremely easy for some people to simply coast through most of their childhood and get to the end of it with a high GPA and absolutely no fucking idea how to survive in the real world. But that doesn't mean all of them have or that sitting back and saying "Fuck it, good grades for for nerds" is going to make you any more successful.
Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher.
So, what's the problem? It's just preparing them for the real life.
That's a bit cynical. I personally *really* didn't like school, but I can't say I didn't learn anything. Yes, I learned more on my own, but many people don't, they require structure for their education.
Children don't know what's good for them. Of course, most adults don't either...
(I think I said something about cynicism earlier in the post... I don't remember...)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
The Greeks must have done something right because 2 million Spartans can't be wrong.
Work-ethic. Awesome.
I was Comp Sci and it was a lazy paradise for me. I also didn't have rich parents or anyone funding my college adventures.
There are a couple of things you can do to greatly improve the college experience. First, the school you pick is going to be a HUGE factor. Consider things like admission requirements and graduation rates. The vast, vast, vast majority of people aren't smart enough to get into MIT *and* slack off *and* graduate.
Truthfully, *where* you went to college doesn't matter much at all. It might affect what companies are at your campus job fair. That's about it. After your first job, nobody will care where you went to college (unless it was MIT/Harvard/etc). So the difference between 'some state school that requires a 25 ACT score to get in' and a state school that requires a 20 to get in - isn't going to have a serious impact in your post-college future. But it can make a world of difference in how much work you have to put in.
I choose a university where I knew I would be smarter than the average student there. That meant, I could less work than the average student and score as high, or higher, than them.
Beyond that - the second most important thing you can do is LEARN THE RULES of your university. That student handbook you get as a freshman - read it. Read it more than once. The game is graduating with the least amount of work possible. That book is the rules. How can you expect to win Monopoly if you haven't read the rules? I can't tell you how many of my friends got 'screwed' at one point or another for not knowing the rules and listening to someone else who told them the rules.
At my university - you could take a certain number of credits 'pass/fail'. Why bust your hump to get an A or a B in some Gen. Ed. you don't care about when you can just take it 'pass/fail' and have it not affect your GPA?
Also, at my university, you had a two week grace period to drop classes/make changes to your course load *without* incurring any fees. Classes are *not* created equal. Even the exact same class, can be much easier or much harder than another session of that same class because of the professor teaching it.
Since my sophomore year, I would *always* enroll in one extra class. I had the first week to decide which of my classes would be the hardest, require the most work, and then I'd drop it. Using sites like 'ratemyprofessor' would help; but a lot of times you didn't see the professors name.
You also get the same amount of credit for a class at 2pm as you do at 8am. Never take a class before noon unless you absolutely have to.
I really can't stress it enough - 'know the rules'. At my school, if you received an F in a class, retook it, and ended with a B - that B would 'replace' the F and your GPA would be a 3.0. If you ended with a D (but needed a C for it to count towards your major) and retook it, ended up with a B - they would average them. And you'd get a GPA for a 2.0
Naturally, the next level of this was the individual class syllabuses. Those were the rules 'for that class'. Not 'as important' but still really useful to pay attention to.
Dealing with teachers was pretty easy too. I found that if you were proactive instead of reactive; they'd let you do most anything. If you came to them the day of a test or after you missed a test and said, 'Gee, I was out of town / sick / whatever' you were screwed. If you came up on the 2nd day of class and said you were on the Universities (name of extracurricular activity) squad and that there was a big tournament you *might* have to attend that would interfere with the midterm; would it be possible to either take it early or the next weekend....most of them were MORE THAN HAPPY to let you take it late. And, by the time you took it, you already had all the answers from your roommate who took it.
Finally, you've got online classes, satellite schools, and CLEP/Equivalency exams. I was 3 credits short; so I showed up and took every one of them tests I could, until I p
What I meant was the *purely* artificial, mechanical systems don't exist. It's the exact opposite -- real life is chaotic and unfair, and the type of "gaming" we're talking about is different. The difference between cheating in a game with strict, defined rules and "cheating in life", where there are no real boundaries.
Look at the comments I posted along this thread, you'll see that in this respect we have the same perspective.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
This. Mod this guy up!
The smart kids can and do cause trouble if they get bored enough, but whether it's cultural (many "dumb" kids come from "dumb" families who simply do not value learning and are only sending the kids to school to get their CYS caseworker off their backs), or learned (the "dumb" kids have been labeled and taught that they aren't going to succeed, and are in fact expected to disrupt, and therefore fall into that behavioral pattern) the end result is that dumb kids ruin learning for others.
That being said I have no issue removing disruptive children to a place where they can be better served and engaged in what they are doing at school. If that means sending them to the dumb class then so be it... you can't force someone to value education. You can only show them what education can do, and hope that they make the decision to educate themselves. Maybe the dumb class should be the class that gets to do all the manual labor, the litter pick-up, the bathroom duty... and it should be explained to them that if they want to move beyond picking up litter on Monday afternoon they need to get their asses in gear and make something better for themselves. Some might like the work and stick around with a better work ethic out of it, go to trade schools, etc. Some might realize they want more and work their asses off to move up to a smarter class. In both cases you've removed the disruption and produced good, hardworking citizens. There will always be a few for whom "nothing" works (generally because their home life is so bad that school can't balance it out no matter how much good they do there), and for those I feel sorry, but for the rest let's give them a chance to work at their own pace and with peers who are at their own level, instead of trying to standardize expectations as well as tests!
Honestly discussions like this are the reason I always liked Slashdot. Just because stances are opposing doesn't mean they don't share the same goals.
You are right in that paying will instill the wrong ideals but I think that problem is easier to deal with than the current problems we have since it will encourage those that currently have no drive to learn to change their ways.
I think you can accomplish both, provide a positive monetary reward and at the same time instill a strong work ethic by helping children to realize that $500 is nothing compared to what they could make if they applied themselves.
As for teaching patriotism it does have the problems you say which is why I don't advocate teaching patriotism. I think that a country is made up of its people and if it's people suck then so does the country. That is why I like my country, because I know a lot of great and positive people that balance out a lot of the negative. Patriotism in a democratic society does little but instill a value in the core beliefs that the country was found upon. Those ideals should not be dictated however as reasonable people should come to conclude the ideals for which the country stands are right and just through their own critical thought and not just because they were told to think it.
My argument is simply that the problems resulting from this will be easier to iron out than the current problems I see with our education system as a whole. It's just my opinion though and you present rather compelling arguments for why I may be wrong.
Personally I found a niche that was paying me in high school and I took it to much further levels than most people my age as I had a motivator beyond my own interests which helped me stay focused. It is certain that this type of motivation will not work for everyone though.
Wrong. Bigger class sizes == fewer teachers == less union dues (for the 100% cynical side).
Bigger class sizes == less demand for teachers == lower teacher pay (for the somewhat cynical side).
Bigger class sizes == less individual attention for the students == the brightest (and dimmest) bulbs don't get as good of an education (for the naive/optimist side).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Interesting. I'd never heard of Frank Miller. Point taken on Heinlein in re literature. But I think you missed the greater point; paying kids to attend school is absurd on so many levels that it's been ridiculed over and over.
And I think you missed my other point - it's not about kids who had a shitty childhood; some of those kids that I've known had good childhoods but still were motivated to be the first ones in their family to get a high school diploma, or a college degree, or a regular job with benefits.
They valued those things in and of themselves, because they were proud to achieve them.
Anyway, not that many years ago parents had to pay for kids to go school; we still do in the US but we call it taxes and impact fees. Now education is free for those who need it most. Education is worth a lot and paying kids results in absurd entitlment attitude when they grow up.
True story: I had someone demand that they get a bonus for not taking sick days. (Recent hire.) They really expected to be rewarded for showing up and not realizing that they already get a reward - it's called a paycheck.
Ouch! Some kids do have to learn the hard way. If he's as smart as you say then he'll find some other way to apply his skills but it will just take a lot longer especially if the relationship gets serious.
I do find it rather curious that its common for an American to go off and live on his/her own at 18 while being uncommon in a great number of other places. I have often felt like there is too much emphasis on using age to divide a population. I know 50 year olds that are as mature at 18 year olds and I know 18 year olds that are as mature as any respectable adult. Some people need extra time living life to fully realize what's in front of them. Five years out of school I remember looking back and being surprised where I ended up which made me start thinking about the next five years and even ten years out.
Long story short; you never know what path someone is going to end up taking. Some people don't want the easy path as they are afraid it will become boring. Some people just don't think that far ahead.
The 40% increase is *not* in grades but in assessment test results. Kids don't care about assessment tests. They effect the school and not the student.
If you tell someone to do something for no reason are they going to do it A) better or B) worse than if you paid them?
The schools are just sharing the money they get from better test results with the kids.
It was getting ass-busting undergrads to do underpaid work while I reap the profits. Mwua-ha-ha.
Seriously... there were and still are lots of opportunities for the bright and lazy to put the work of their fellow students to good use. Running a sysadmin service was a good one when I was in school.
Laziness, after all, is the driver of much innovation.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That could be. But I don't think the answer is to make the smart kids pay by having a lesser education, so that the dumb kids have an opportunity to improve. This seems totally unfair.
95% of what you learned in school was worthless?
So sad.
You know, I did a computing degree in Computer Science. I graduated in 1976.
I reckon I used most of it. Yup, even COBOL.
But what I learned, most essentially, was nothing about computing, as such.
I learned how to solve problems.
I learned how to learn new things.
I learned how to find things from book and people (no Internet then) and use that.
I learned how to - learn.
And it sounds like you did too.
From your parents, your friends, your school teachers, your university education you learned how to find out about your world and solve problems.
On the way, you probably picked up a stack of things you might not think useful - the capital of France, the name of the highest mountain in the world, the currency used in Germany (oops, that's changed - are you keeping up? .. I suspect you are). And you learned to stay up to date. This is good. You are a much more interesting person to talk to than someone who knows none of those things (not necessarily nicer, but probably more interesting).
Not educating people has been tried - it doesn't go well. In general, the countries that give the best education to the highest proportion of its citizens tend to be at the top of the human development index - and that that do badly end up at the bottom. Coincidence? No, I don't think so. (USA is not at the top - 15th - sad, isn't it? [Disclaimer - I live in Australia, at 4th position, so I'm biased])
Learning for a reason - perhaps not. No. I mean, there just aren't that many people that speak Latin, for example, but it is still fairly widely learned.
Again, what is learning about? If you learn just one thing you are going to do badly. When I studied my degree, the logical thing to do would have been to learn COBOL. Just COBOL. That's not what happened - and my life is far richer than it would have been.
So, keep learning. Don't decry your past learning - you are a student all your life.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Corruption is easy to remove if there are several teachers capable of marking the same exam - randomize who marks which paper. Giving kickbacks to every possible teacher would work out too expensive.
it's to make classes a little smaller (~15 students per class),
I agree with you about making the classes smaller. I would even go so far as to say make them 5 or 6 students per class.
make sure they're fairly well mixed with respect to the average intelligence of the students in the class, and for the love of all that is digital do not teach at the rate of the slowest learner.
Now you've already run into problems. If you do not teach to the slowest learner, then the slowest learner must necessarily be left behind. Even more so if you are teaching to challenge the faster learner. What good are you doing the slowest learner if you are leaving the him/her behind?
Having been both home-schooled and public-schooled for various parts of my education (I attended high school and elementary school, but not middle school), I can say that homeschooling is as good as the student. The "socializing" argument is easily reversed: for the outcasts (like my brother, who was teased to the point of tears on a daily basis because of his writing disability), or for those who have better things to do (I wanted to study my computer science. Learning the same elementary algebra 3 years in a row at a public elementary school just doesn't help that task along), homeschooling is a reprieve from the "socializing" that is doing a lot more harm than good.
I believe that homeschooling versus public schooling versus any other option that might be available needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Treating children as if they all learn in the same way, at the same pace, or with their age group just doesn't work. Homeschooling isn't for everyone. Neither are public schools. Both can be equally damaging to someone who isn't suited to the environment. And the "lack of socializing" is becoming less and less of an issue as the internet becomes more prevalent (and, there are plenty of places to go other than a school to interact with your peers. But your peers aren't always those who share your age -- as in my brother's case, or TFA's case, where the age group taunts the kid or is so far behind the kid that there's no comparison).
My $0.02. Probably biased :)
Hey, I completely agree with you that teaching to the test is bad and a waste of time. But I do think that rewarding kids who get good grades is a good idea, and that folks react to it with a baby/bathwater mentality. If the problem is teachers teaching to the test, work on that problem (make it hard to guess what the test will be like). If the problem is lazy teachers who teach to the test instead of teaching concepts, make the test punish those teachers. Attack the root cause, not this methodology that appears to improve kids' grades. Grades aren't everything, but they are incredibly important.
The root cause of all this hubbub about standardized testing has nothing to do with the kids. It has everything to do with the teacher's union violently attacking any methodology that separates the good from the bad, and the hardworking teachers from the lazy. All unions are deathly afraid of anything that promotes competition between their members. There is a time-tested reason why unions promote seniority rather than performance.
Much of the business world involves finding constructive tasks to perform when you are bored out of your skull so it makes sense that school would discourage disruptive behavior even if the student proves that he understand the materials being taught.
This statement does not compute... I'll try to fix it for you:
Much of the business world involves finding constructive tasks to perform when you are bored out of your skull, so it should make sense that school would find some constructive task for the students to do instead of boring the students out of their skulls.
Study habits don't "rub off". I don't know where this nonsense idea came from that good study habits are a contagious disease that idiots can catch from smart kids.
I've been paired with an amazing number of idiots throughout my elementary/middle/high school "career". What actually happens is that in any case the dumbass takes credit for all the work the smart kid does.
If you're lucky, the dumb kid admits that he doesn't know anything and shuts the fuck up while you do the work. If you're not lucky then the dumb kid expects you to explain everything to him.
"working in teacher assigned pairs" is really code for "Make the smart kids teach the dumb ones so the teacher can sit on their lazy ass".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
You must be a joy to work for, you either have unpaid sick days or you are a skinflint who doesn't get that the worker saved you money and is asking for consideration for that.
As far as the "absurdity" of rewarding children for working hard, I'm afraid just because you say it's been universially ridiculed, I don't quite buy it.
I might not have gotten $50 every achievement test, but I most certainly did receive rewards for working hard and getting good grades in school, and a good majority of the non-poverty level children in the world could probably claim the same.
There were school programs like the free personal pan pizzas for reading a certain number of book, or free tickets (albeit in the nosebleed sections) to sports events for good quarterly grades, or even a bump in allowance when the grade cards came out. This isn't new, this isn't ridiculous. The only difference between this and those programs that we had as kids is this is cold hard cash and it's for a class of tests that as a kid, I was never privy to the results of.
And honestly, none of us, not you, not me, not your work crews, grew up with our motivations set in stone or even with motivations at all (other than, "I want mamma and daddy to love me.") we were given them through our upbringing and environment. Those kids that wanted to 'be the first' didn't start out wanting it, they wanted it to make someone proud or to prove to themselves something.
If the school happens to step in and help that out by helping kids, many of which haven't yet figured out that coasting through life is not going to be as easy as it seems when you are living on your parents dime, find motivation, then more power to it.
You seem to not have noticed, but they don't all make it to the end of their childhood actually wanting to do shit but shit, eat, and shit some more. If it takes proding to help reduce that number and increase the number of folk who are actually motivated to work because they 'get' that work = money, then I could give a shit about entilements. They aren't fucking adults, I don't expect them to have their heads on completely straight yet.
God, I wish that were true. Just thinking about my student loan debt makes my bowels evacuate.
Teachers reward those who repeat what the book rather than those who demonstrate actual understanding of the material.
In many schools they remove credit from students grades for frequent absence, frequent tardiness, or as a result of in school suspension. Those things have no impact on whether the student understands the material taught but school funding is determined largely by attendance metrics.
BAD teachers reward those who repeat what the book rather than those who demonstrate actual understanding of the material. Or, those teachers a hamstrung by bad administrative policy.
In the case of punishing students for absence, tardiness, etc. those are typically- at least in the US- also administrative policies that the teachers cannot choose to ignore on a whim.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Heh... In the 10 years I owned my company, I never had a person quit to go to work for a competitor. Actually most people like working for me. And the benefits we offered were better than most of our competitors. But enough of that.
I don't ridicule rewarding kids; I ridicule paying kids cash - huge amounts of cash - for doing what they should be doing. I think kids should be rewarded for doing well. A pizza - great. A movie ticket, an afternoon at the bowling alley - great.
But hundreds of dollars for a kid who is 11? That seems seems a bit out of line....
The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic.
You know, every person I've ever known professionally who used the term "work ethic" was so into monitoring what other people were doing that they got lost in a fit of cynical self despair. True story:
"Worker#1" was always on time, worked a full shift, clocked in and out, and produced mediocre work.
"Worker#2" was frequently late, goofed off at work occasionally, forgot to clock in or out, and produced outstanding work.
Worker#1 said to me "I don't know why you allow Worker#2 to goof off - I work much harder than he does and am always on time.
I replied "He gets his work done on time, and I wouldn't come down on you if you decided to goof off occasionally or arrive late."
The reply was "I wouldn't do that, because I have a work ethic!"
What Worker#1 failed to recognize was that it was the results that mattered, not how hard you believed yourself to be working. It's not just that - in "creative" industries (web development, in this case), goofing off is vitally important. Creativity can't be forced, and it's been my experience that the brain needs to rest to be able to foster creativity properly. Spending your "down" time mentally criticizing your fellow employees and obsessing over "work ethic" just makes you unhappy.
As a parent, I have tried many things to motivate my children. But the one most successful method has been money for pre-stated accomplishments. Money for success works; period. My eldest just turned 18, and will go off to college. I guess teaching her to be goal oriented with long term planning will finally flourish, or something else not so promising. But from personal experience, I have been more involved when rewards were put in writing, then backed up with results...
Depends, for some subjects like mathematics, the repetitious "busywork" is actually useful in that you are trying to develop brain structures for automatically performing certain types of operations and recognizing certain patterns. As anybody who has done some work with neural networks will tell you, results for that come through lots of repetition. Unlike most subjects, the material taught in one year of mathematics usually builds on the material taught the previous year too, so it's a very important subject in which to perform all the work.
The only thing that comes close might be English and other languages, and you can pick up the rules of grammar for a language in 2 to 3 years, the rest is memorization of vocabulary and verb conjugations.
So as far as I'm concerned, after Math and the prevalent 1 or 2 languages of your area, learn some history/political science and the basics of physical/economic geography for your local area/country, with the understanding that by the time you graduate (and certainly over the course of your life) the latter probably won't be that accurate anymore. The important thing to learn besides a good mathematical and communications foundation, is enough of the brush strokes of history to recognize when a politician or some other demagogue (or even an investment promoter) is trying to con you.
Outside of math and english, the memorization busywork isn't of much use beyond getting you to practice research and composition. Anything you remember of the rest is just gravy and really just there to help you figure out what you're good at and what you want to do with your life. Then learn what you need to know for what you want to do after you get out of school.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Needing a PhD to do a menial job is just another baby boomer scam. It is so they can have a different excuse than age discrimination. They did that to their elder generation by saying applicants where "overqualified." Problem is, quite a few HR idiots believe those are valid reasons now. Sometimes they are valid, but most of the time not.
I had the same exact conversation with my parents too. Later I found out from my little brother that there was one kid in his school that got paid $50 for each C they got, $100 for each B, and something like $150 for each A they got, every 6 weeks grading period. This was when he was in highschool which was from 2005 till a few weeks ago when he graduated.
Jeeze, this highschool puts you in 8 classes, and that kid was getting $50 for each C. You gotta be a freaking idiot to get under a C in any highschool course, especially in the normal ones and not the AP type classes. I can't believe his parents were giving him at least $400 every 6 weeks.
Now my parents never gave me any kind of allowance. It was ok though because of two reasons. I don't think I was spoiled, but I more or less got whatever I wanted. I mean, within reason. I really felt like I never asked for something unless it was something I wanted really, really bad. Now another reason I got no allowance, I never had any chores. I was under the impression that to get an allowance you had to do chores. I remember even asking my parents to give me chores once so I could get an allowance, but they told me there wasn't really anything for me to do. Dad was always scared I'd cut my foot off or something if I cut the yard, mom was scared I'd mess up the clothes if I washed them, and with vacuuming and washing the dishes, I guess my mom just liked having something to do. She was just a house mom so her whole day mostly consisted of watching tv.
Anyways, when I have kids I'm not sure how I'm gonna encourage them with school. I really want to tell them that your grades really don't matter until highschool, and even then they only matter if you plan on going into a 4-year university. If they go to community college first like me, then the highschool grades definitely wont matter for getting in, but they might matter for getting scholarships.
My wife & I pay extra for A's.. (only A's)
rl equiv = incentive bonus, performance bonus, etc..
"gimme" classes like PE, Music, etc.. dont count, also only current grading period counts, not semester/final avg.
our "formula" is
1st A = 1/2 current grade level rounded down..
each A after is $1 higher..
(This is from each of us)
Example.. 6th grade w/ 3 A's
$3 + $4 + $5 = $12 from each parent. ($24 total)
9th grade, 3 A's
$4 + $5 + $6 = $15 ($30 total)
In addition, if all grades that we count are A's then extra = last amount for an A + $1..
Ex:
6th grade, 5 A's out of 5
$3 + $4 + $5 + $6 + $7 + ($8 extra)
($33 from each parent)
Yes, because teachers are complete idiots and don't know the value of $5 offered from a recklessly disobedient and malicious kid versus forcing that kid to accept what he/she had coming.
You might be able to find five (5) teachers across the entire US that have accepted monetary bribes from kids to raise their grades, but that is by far anywhere even close to the majority of teachers.
Unless you meant something other than money by the term "kickbacks", in which case you might be correct.
The only difference that comes to mind is that slave labor produces something of benefit: cotton, pyramids, etc.
Umm, no.
Slave labour produces something of benefit to the slaver, at the expense of the child. Eg. The slaver gets something, and the child gets nothing.
School labor only produces completed schoolwork: answers to questions whose answers are already known, essays that are thrown away after being graded, tests that serve only to change the letter that appears on a piece of paper at the end of the quarter.
and an educated child. A child that will grow up to have better opportunities and be able to provide better for themselves.
So the difference is: one produces a benefit for the slaver, at the expense of the child, where the other produces no benefit for the educator, and a benefit for the child.
In other words, they are exactly the same, except that they're completely different.
Heinlein wrote some very good stuff, but he was a bit out there sometimes too. On the one hand, you would prefer that your kid actually like learning for its own sake, instead of only being driven by greed (i.e. self-motivated rather than salary-motivated). On the other hand, how s/he does in school will impact his/her earning potential in the long run, so perhaps giving that student an up front example of it isn't such a bad thing. Who knows, maybe while they work on getting those A's, they'll figure out that this learning stuff isn't so bad and some of those subjects can be interesting and fun.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
>And what test metric measures a students creativity, critical thinking, and capacity for independent thought?
You'll have to come up with that yourself. I imagine something like and IQ test might do. The point I am trying to make is that if you are unhappy with what is currently being taught and the metric used to determine success or failure of teaching it, then you will need to come up with alternatives.
All of this is beside paying students for achieving whatever metric you deem suitable. If you aren't able to create a metric to measure the success of your curriculum, well, you have your work cut out for you, then.
>The medium is the message. Tests aren't designed to teach that kind of knowledge. You can change the questions on the tests, but
>the fact that they are tests means they will always be test questions. In other words, questions with a clear simple answer.
>How do we test students on subjects without simple answers? Essays are probably more effective in that area, as would be the
>type of experiential testing that I'm advocating.
That's fine by me. Come up with a superior method of teaching and metrics to measure your success or failure of the processes you employ and I'm all for it.
I'm still all for paying students as an incentive for scoring highly on your metric.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
My wife and I have decided we're going to home school. Researching this, we've found that studies show that children that are home school are statistically better socialized. Are there plenty of cases that we can all think of where parents home school just to shelter their children? Sure, but overall, people that enter home schooling with the right attitude about engaging children with people outside the home have children that are better off. First off, much of the time spent in school isn't spent socializing, it's spent sitting quietly a few feet from friends, whom you aren't allowed to talk to for most of the day. With one day a week around other home school students plus a few activities, a student can get the same amount of socialization that the institution taught student gets in a whole week.
Plus we have the opportunity to have our students go and experience the things they want to learn first hand from some place, and interact with adults. We also remove them from an atmosphere where many students punish their peers for success, and where bullying is prevalent by underachievers against achievers.
But the real reason we've decided to home school is that by every metric that yields success in school, home schooling is better than institution schooling. Those things that really seem to matter are parent interest and participation and student to teacher ratio. Even when home schooling multiple children at a time, the parent does most of the instruction in a one-on-one or a one-on-two basis, and most of the learning comes from reading material that could have been assigned in the school and done at home, or in lab activities. Home school children have a much higher self motivation to learn in a home school situation, because the class moves at their speed, and is best taught tailored to their interests.
Yes but what IS better?
Does your "better" reflect knowledge and skills that will apply to real-world environments and situations?
Or is the "better" more memorization and rote learning without developing any understanding or thinking skills?
While memorization is an important part of learning, and is necessary to a certain extent true skill development comes from thinking skills, and practices that have proven very difficult to show on tests.
If we could make tests that work so well then why would colleges look at anything other than a perspective student's SAT's?
Do the Lambdas get a free pass?
is always about how to corrupt
Smart kids are usually generous. They'll often help the slower kids on their own time - staying after class or after school even to help slower kids (I did it myself a few times for friends).
I don't think it's much of an issue.
Obviously, if our 11-year-old astrophysicist is in the class, there could be problems, but that's not really the point ;)
The problem is that the paper test to become say an auto mechanic is vastly different than actually disassembling an engine?
Would you let a surgeon work on you who has passed all of his paper tests and never cut into a single body before?
Paper tests, especially standardized ones, give standardized questions. Questions which have formulaic solutions. To be truly innovative means going up against questions which have never been asked before or at least never been solved so formulaic methods to getting to those answers will not work.
Yes tests do work fairly well at certain things, but they are not fool proof and standardized tests introduce many many fools to the equation.
I'm not saying that it is a bad idea entirely but I am saying it may have its drawbacks.
and an educated child. A child that will grow up to have better opportunities and be able to provide better for themselves.
Well, that's the theory, but in practice, much of what kids are required to do in school bears no relation to future opportunities or providing for themselves.
So the difference is: one produces a benefit for the slaver, at the expense of the child, where the other produces no benefit for the educator, and a benefit for the child.
It isn't a benefit just because you call it a benefit, or just because you intend for it to be beneficial.
For example, virtually no one benefits from filling out a vocabulary worksheet to translate the imaginary bunny language of Watership Down into English, or from knowing which tribe settled the Willamette Valley, but those are exactly the sorts of work that many students' grades depend on. Frankly, they'd be better off picking cotton or building pyramids than wasting their time on busy work like that.
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Study habits don't "rub off". I don't know where this nonsense idea came from that good study habits are a contagious disease that idiots can catch from smart kids.
Kids imitate eachother to feel accepted. Thats why they all want to dress alike and listen to certain types of music. They absorb values through their peer group. If their peer group values good grades, they might be encouraged to get good grades too. I never said it happens all the time, but it does happen. I've seen it happen. It's happened to me.
"working in teacher assigned pairs" is really code for "Make the smart kids teach the dumb ones so the teacher can sit on their lazy ass".
Yeah well obviously if you have a lazy teacher who doesn't keep an eye on the students progress, some kids will take advantage of others. You gotta make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. You also gotta make it easier to hold kids accountable. Keeping slow students at pace with good students doesn't mean letting bullies skip out on their responsibilities. Your teacher should have been fired.
There is certainly stratification in my school and district. The difference between this and "tracking" from the 80's is in flexibility. That is, students can be at one level for math and a different one for science, for example. It boggles my mind, but I have kids who do well in physics and poorly in calculus. This sort of flexibility is designed to maximize the educational opportunity for all students.
The other kind of flexibility is in movement between levels. Kids who show a great work ethic or greater ability than is normal for their level of course are free to move up, sometimes during the same school year if it's early enough. Our central office is very much behind the idea of allowing students to take on greater challenges if they and their teachers think it's time.
#2 is bullshit. Unless you have some evidence I'm just going to leave it at that.
#3 - standardized tests have been hampered by the notion that all students regardless of special ed status will be required to pass the same tests. That's the way it is in my state, anyway, so YMMV. States, (rightly) fearing lawsuits when their special needs kids don't graduate high school, have backed off from this but are too politically invested in the central notion to admit that their tests are BS. As an example, we had someone from the state at school one day talking to us about the math exam. One of the test items she showed us was about simple random sampling, and none of the answer choices were correct. After a bit of explanation, the lady understood that none of the answer choices were correct, and then asked us to set that issue aside. That encounter is fundamental to understanding the issues surrounding a test designed by a state level education department. You know the adage about "those who can't?" People at the state are "those who can't teach."
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Clearly we know the value of education, but the acid test in this debate is to find the motivation for kids to learn.
This is the age where knowledge on the Internet is slowly coming into being. It is almost free to have enough knowledge to earn a degree at the home computer. So in a few years, we might finally have the answer. In this near future, there will be no excuse for literate able-bodied people to say "I can't get an education". Average ten year olds should be able to think "if I work hard, I can earn my freedom from relative poverty and hardship," and by so doing know enough to earn a degree by the time they're 15.
If a few bucks can boost a few scores, how about the promise of quick independence and potentially unlimited earnings???
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
My parents gave me an allowance which wasn't tied to either grades or chores. My sisters and I were expected to get good grades for own own benefit. We were expected to do chores (a few hours a week) because (as my parents put it) that was part of being in a family. We were given an allowance so that we could learn to manage money, exercise a little independence and prioritise our wants.
I learned that when I used to be a Republican. :)
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The teachers seemed to change how classes were chosen every year but a popular method was:
1. Take the top 60 students. Form them up into 2 classes of 30 randomly.
2. Take the other 90 students and randomly assign them to 3 classes of 30.
Obviously adjust numbers for bigger or smaller schools. I'd say this method worked pretty well. I was usually in one of the top classes for Math or Science and one of the bottom ones for English.
With a class structure like this if you're in the top tier then you aren't getting held back by the trouble-makers, people who don't want to learn, those below average intelligence etc. The teacher can also go on to extension work and more interesting things once you finish the basic work.
If you're in the bottom tier of classes, you just do the basic work. I'm sure it makes the teachers job a lot easier though, as they can take the time to explain things in more detail without the bright students getting bored and acting up. I'd also say it gives the students some incentive as they can still top their class.
Maybe if they learned more, they'd know why they should give a shit about education.
The ______ Agenda
Education for education's sake?
OMG!
I don't think so. Education = $$$.
Its already been mentioned here, so I won't go beyond that.
I wish I got paid for grades. It would have motivated me a little more.
As for the education I received in my gov't funded high school, it was utter garbage.
But I passed, got that useless high school diploma, and moved on.
I know someone in the system that will attest to the waste and corruption in the system: high degree of bureaucracy; excessively high number of administrative and support staff (counselors, "special ed" people); and principals with no background in education eager only to put on a show.
Couple that with continuous watering down and rebranding of basic subjects -- no more chemistry or physics, but "earth science" -- and you won't be getting much more by bribing kids. Couple that with the ever simplification of exams, and all you get is further waste of money.
What's unfortunate about this model is that most of the successes earned in the real world directly contrast this ideal of diligence and academic mastery. Yes, there are influential leaders that truly did work hard to earn their position; Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor are widely prevalent examples of such people. However, the majority of those who have earned similar authorities were either "born into it," immorally attained it or luckily had it bestowed on them.
Now, I'm not advocating schools to pay students for good grades; on the contrary, I think it completely disregards the true intent of earning an education. I argue that this model is well-aligned with what most "successful" students can expect after their academic careers come to an end.
Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher.
Dedication is something that has "nothing to do with education"? Dude, dedication is 90% of education. Working hard, keeping at it when you're stuck, making sure that you take the time to work on learning new stuff every day, no matter how much other stuff you've got going on, no matter how sick you happen to be - that's exactly what education is!
It's also great preparation for life after school
I saw this striking scatterplot a couple years back that a student had put together from a survey he'd done. On the X axis was the categorical data of "What do you believe leads to good grades?", with the options being "Hard Work", or "Intelligence". The Y axis were peoples' grades. There was a cluster above 3.5 that all answered "Hard Work", and another cluster below 3.0 that all answered "Intelligence"
It's kinda like in real life - hard work pays off.
Worrying about other people's business, regardless of the content, tends to do that. Worry about what you do, and whether it's up to snuff. Let the world worry about the rest.
I partially disagree. While this is the situation for many college students, there actually are quite a few opportunities out there, both paid and unpaid, that can advance students in their field of study significantly.
How many of these students actually consult with their career services departments (and I mean hunt them down) to gather internship opportunities? How many students get out there and network with working professionals (save workshops and stuff) to extend their contact pool? How many students waste an incredible amount of time partying, drinking and living the high life?
Example: I was in the bathroom taking care of business, and I overheard two seniors talking about vacation. One of them had the option of either landing an internship or taking off the entire summer, flying to Vegas and just "chillin'." He decided to chill for the summer, and explicitly rely on his parents to come both the vacation and any outstanding loans and such.
Now, to give benefit of the doubt, he could have been in school for three summers, or was already working really hard and needed a break. However, something tells me that neither of those were the case.
This is one example out of many. To say that college kids can do "nothing" to expand their opportunities is horribly one-sided.
If you read the article instead of knee jerking about how people are stupid and "OMG this is entitlement", you'd realize it isn't hundreds of dollars. Your 11 year old would be making at most $25 bucks a test (and since it says up to I imagine that's only if they score in the top percentile, esp since this is an achivement test, not "pop quiz" crap.)
Given there were ten tests in the year, a genius level 11 year old might make $250 a year. Which, is just about in line with normal 'bribes' for good behavior.
What happens when the kids performance becomes an important contribution to family income? Then the kid actually can't score well on a subject and ? What happens when a kid hits the news for being beaten by a parent for not scoring well? What happens when kids cheat to score higher? What happens when its easier to mug the kid who did well then to be the kid that did well? Its a piss poor solution to complex problem.
The payments are for scores on standardized tests, not teacher grades. So kickbacks would have to be for teachers who can help kids learn to earn the money -- kind of like Kaplan/Princeton etc.
FTFA: "About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program -- which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments -- improved their scores since last year's state tests by margins above the citywide average.
The gains at some schools approached 40 percentage points. "
Sounds like a neat idea. It's like a little career, before your real career. Maybe this would motivate some kids that are otherwise thinking, "why should I do well in school?" Sort of a sampler as to what could happen if you work hard.
Of course, there's the cheating/collusion/milking the system angle. One would have to put in some pretty intense safeguards. Anyone clever enough to get past them, well, heck, maybe they earned it.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
An 11 year old is 6th grade, so presumably the payout would be higher. As I said in the beginning, I'd love to see a statistical breakdown, *especially* what happens once the rewards stop.
I've been around long enough to see these programs come and fail. Every one of these bizarre ideas that fail to understand that education is important in and of itself has so far failed in the long run.
It still doesn't address the rewards of cheating; this program monetizes getting good scores on a test, not for learning. That's a huge incentive for cheating.
I've taught college level classes and the most troublesome students are those who feel entitled to a grade because they tried hard, or showed up to class, and utterly failed to understand that they're there not be rewarded by the prof/teacher but to actually learn something.
I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.
At the same time, you don't instantly gain the ability to critically think just because you are in college now.
That, my friend, is what we call a statistic outlier.
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As per research studies there is no such thing as intrinsic motivation. http://tr.im/mKH0
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I understand and agree that mixing students -should- allow faster learners to be leaders and set a positive example, but if that were the real life result, we wouldn't be having this discussion, right?
Yeah $250 - $500 bucks is enough to get bad parents to game this.
I definitly agree with you, school teaches you a lot of valuable lessons. How to suck up to your superiors so you can get ahead without working too much. How to deal with collegues who don't really like that behaviour. How to avoid those that try nothing but to make your life miserable. How to weasel out of problems, like when you forgot to do something important, and how to shift the blame on someone else.
Sure, that doesn't really help the company you're about to work for because, essentially, that doesn't make you a better worker. But it sure helps you to appear like one, get promoted and have a comfortable life without knowing or working more than the bare minimum.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think this is more sizzle than steak.
While there is no doubt that a 4 year degree can have a lot of valuable content, the only thing that 4 year degree really proves, at the end of the day, is that the student can follow through on a long term goal and jump through hoops on command.
Employers find that more comforting for some reason.
Sorry, but no.
In school, I learned how to circumvent problems. How to move things aside that don't really interest me and still get them done somehow. Cribbing, cheating, making lame excuses, testing all the ways this can be accomplished and finding out which routines work and which don't.
How to solve problems is something I had to teach myself.
Because, and here's the problem that you mention but don't adress: You don't learn how to learn at school. And that's maybe the biggest mistake that I can spot in our school system. Too much focus on facts, too little focus on understanding. Facts are meaningless. Facts are available to anyone, instantly, in this time of computer libraries and encyclopedias. You wanna know when the 30 years war was fought? You can look it up. Much more exactly than even history majors could know. And it takes barely longer than remembering it if you learned it by heart.
What matters is understanding, insight, making connections, understanding how facts tie together and how they influence each other. How to use them to build something new on top of them. That's something no computer will take away from you in any forseeable time, the ability to use intelligence to invent, to gain insight, to learn.
I don't know about your school. Mine was about 99% facts and 1% application. The best students were, essentially, the sponges: Able to suck in any amount of information, as nonsensical as it may be, and reproduce it at the next test. Whenever our textbooks had a printing error, this error, no matter how obvious or blatant it may have been, has been truely copied by the sponges. It was most obvious that these people did not understand at all what they were doing when they copied even grammatical errors in business standard letters. It was in the book, so it was gospel. So it was written, so it was done.
None of these people got anywhere in the real world. Sure, they had great marks and they were offered very interesting jobs, only to fail miserably whenever a situation arose that required understanding, insight and the ability to apply the knowledge you allegedly have.
Now tell me, is that what schools should teach you? If not, why do they?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because blue collar work, "working with your hands", is shunned and looked down at. You're getting dirty. You're using your body and not your brain. I'm fairly sure, even here you will find quite a few people who consider people who learn a trade "too dumb to do something smart".
And salaries reflect that. Unjustified, if you ask me. I tried my hand at a few "blue collar" part time jobs while getting my degree. Money is always welcome, but this money was hard earned. Not to mention that I am unable to put stones on top of each other in a way that they stay that way.
Now, I'd be lying if I said I'm unhappy that my "brainy" work of programming and IT administration is better paid than plumbing and bricklaying. Hey, even I am a little selfish. I just don't understand it. If you'd ask me what's harder, it's a no brainer. On one hand pushing a few buttons on a keyboard, on the other lugging around a few 100 pounds of cement and bricks...
And if you ask me what's more important... well, try to live in a well secured server...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's still a difference between "Oh Timmy, you'll never learn it, stupid dimwit!" and "Well, Bobby, are you sure that's the answer to question 13?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know many schools where you actually "earn" a degree. When I look at the people I tend to get with a still-wet-ink bac or masters in IT, and when I then look at their ability to get work done (both, concerning knowledge and 'work ethics'), the degree usually doesn't tell me jack.
It tells me that schools (and with an alarmingly increasing speed universities too) didn't change much since I went there. Grades reflect your ability to soak up information. Not your ability to use it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Grades have always been an indicator of how well you've mastered that course, not the material in it. Seldom does a grade truly reflect one's mastery of the material taught.
I got an A in a summer course on Thermodynamics while slacking it the entire way. It felt cheap, but it sure helped my GPA steer away from the gutter. On the other hand, I nearly failed a Linear Algebra course that I must have spent several hours a day, daily, studying and preparing for. Math is not my strong suit, but I'm decent at it. That, however, was something I just didn't get. (I'm re-taking it the next time I have space to do so.)
Needless to say, I retained MUCH more about linear algebra than I ever will about thermodynamics (except stuff about Carnot engines). Neither course, however, really helped me in any of the co-op jobs I've had these last four years, but just about everything I've learned before and outside of college helped me immensely.
It's not about the grade (though one shouldn't slack it).
> And if you ask me what's more important... well, try to live in a well secured server...
I'm a spambot you insensitive clod!
My parents used to pay money for good grades. Every A+ I got for a subject was $50, every A was $20. It never really made me do any better. Like, it wasn't really a motivation for me...I only really thought about it *when* the report came out and I went to go collect my money.
I think a work ethic is more important, or an interest in understanding what's going on. I mean ultimately, everyone knows good grades tends to lead to a better job, but this doesn't motivate that many people except maybe in their final year. Obviously, short term goals such as money by the end of the year certainly provide slightly better motivation, but I imagine it can't really be that much more.
Slightly off topic, but one thing I noticed is a lot of people who breezed through subjects at a younger age with little or no study, suck balls when it comes to studying. I used to always get straight A+'s in all Maths and Science subjects with no studying, sleeping in classes, etc. Then when it came to final year...I struggled to get myself to study. I just didn't have the discipline to sit down for long periods of time and concentrate. I graduated with a 97.80 percentile in my state, and in my first year of university, failed 4 subjects. Hell...I'm trying to study for exams now and procrastinating on Slashdot. =P
~Jarik
Working in Holland, I once went to a bar (actually, I went to a lot of bars) where a band was playing. Singing, in fact - in English.
But as you listened, you gradually realised that, despite the fact they were singing English - they didn't speak it. It was weird. The intonation was ever so slightly off.
I understand your point on parroting - indeed, a disturbing amount of modern life is about parroting - the modern computing idiom requires a ridiculous amount of parroted knowledge (Java frameworks, .net calls, ludicrous XML structures) and relatively little understanding. Or so I see it - I'm really bad at remembering things, but really good at understanding them - and so not that good at passing their dopey tests. Annoying.
I am sorry to hear you attended a daft education system - I went in the UK, which was less obsessed with parroting and more interested in understanding, but I may have been lucky. (And they did make me learn Latin for a while, which I assure you, is punishment enough for anyone).
Sponges - not very strong, and if pressed, get all wet. Hmm.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Then solve the riddle and you win the ultimate prize: Good education
Here's your task: Create a test that tests the student's ability to apply the knowledge he gained, in real world situation.
Got something? Great. Now change it so the average teacher can grade it sensibly because, as we know, real life situations are rarely if ever textbook style.
The main problem I'd see is that "real questions" are open ended. And they're not "in the book" (after all, we don't want sponging, that's one of the requirements, no learning by heart, we want to see the student apply the knowledge he gained to judge whether he understood it and is able to apply it to new situations.
Tell you what'd happen if that was implemented. We'd end up with yet another standard test, which is superdupersecret and absolutelyunderwraps... for a year at best. After that, every teacher will start teaching to the new standard test with all those "not in the book" questions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Can you measure, objectively and sensibly, the mastery of the English language? How do you do that? Counting the different words the student uses? Counting the words you, as his teacher, have to look up in a dictionary to learn their meaning? How "well" he uses "fitting" words (what's "fitting", by what measure?)?
How do you measure a student's ability to write good code? Counting his lines? Counting the amount of comments? How do you measure the quality of comments? You could measure the quality (speed, memory efficiency, etc) of his algorithms, would you allow him to argue why he chose a certain approach (maybe to keep the code adaptable for future implementations?)?
I'm a fan of good metrics and measurements. I'm a statistician, after all. At least my degree says so. But how do you measure something that's based on non-measurable factors?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sure the notion of being payed for doing schoolwork has occurred to everyone in their elementary days. Then I got older and realized that I was getting an education for free. (Really through taxes, but essentially free.)
They do, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because "they do" is not entirely correct. They don't exist inherently. They do exist now, because they were made up, so we can measure and compare students and their success.
Invariably, when you create an artificial scale to compare people, people will start playing the system instead of the game. When you compare people by their size, there's little they can do to cheat. Everybody has a certain body size. When you compare them by their intellectual properties, you're in the "system gaming" world already.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In hindsight, I'm quite glad that they didn't. I ended up much better for it.
Maybe, maybe not. There is no way you can say for sure. Saying this is just stupid.
When trying for non-formulaic, open ended questions, you're facing two problems: Teachers who don't know enough themselves to actually assess the quality of the student's answer, and the danger of playing favorites.
A bad teacher could easily be tricked by a clever student into thinking he knows a lot about the subject, more than the teacher himself, and pass the, equally bad but good at conning, student because he doesn't want to look stupider than his student.
Likewise, the difficulty of different open ended questions is hard to level. Too easily poor students that managed to brownnose properly could get trivial questions while good students who have been showing the teacher just what a hack he really is could be given the unanswerable riddle of the ages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As an engineering major, I could run off and co-op making 5-6x minimum wage. How people put themselves through college flipping burgers is beyond me.
All you have to study is something you can't use in the economy. What kind of job could you hope for with, say, archaeology and anthropology?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Something tells me your major wasn't classic dance or ancient babylonian history, right?
Good jobs are out there, IF you study the right thing. Then again, the same applies to having the right degree...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sponges flatten easily under pressure.
Aside of that, I can't really share your point of view. IT, development especially, is one of the few fields that I know where parroting won't get you anywhere. Unless of course you're reinventing the wheel over and over, but ... well, shouldn't those frameworks make this unnecessary? :)
Generally, though, RAD tools did push the industry forwards. You end up with less repetition than before, I can't even count how many times I rewrote the basic Windows frame...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a fair criticism, and I definitely do not want to paint myself in the corner by claiming that all tests accurately measure all aspects of a child's development. I also don't believe that a machine-readable test is the best way to gauge performance. I DO believe that, in general, kids who score better on tests have better mastery of the subject in question than kids who score worse. I DO believe that pushing a kid to score better on a test is a good thing and outweighs the negatives we can all think of.
Back to the topics you brought up. RE mastery of the English language- the SAT verbal section sets out to do exactly that through a diverse battery of questions involving sentence structure, reading comprehension, and a human-read series of essays. Of course, there is not perfect correlation between SAT Verbal scores and "mastery of the English language," but I'll bet it's within reason. A college looking to admit kids would be stupid to only look at SAT scores. But, it might raise red flags if a student has gotten great grades, but scores significantly poorer than his/her peers on the SAT. As a statistician, you might be willing to take the bet that this pattern is more likely to be caused by a non-challenging school district than by a flawed SAT.
Regardless, we're talking about measuring populations here (improve the performance/grades of all kids, not certain kids). If we threw out all ideas because they are not perfect, we would still be sitting around chewing on raw meat and complaining that the wheel is useless because I've got to build a road to use it.
Sorry to hear that. I'd like to chime in on this one.
I have 3 lovely, well adjusted, funny, principled, intelligent daughters. I do not deserve them.
All 3 were valedictorians of their HS, without pushing by us.
Anecdotal? Perhaps, but harder to argue with results * 3.
I've never before shared this much info about what we did. FWIW, YMMV, etc.
1) Give them the gift of self esteem. Demonstrate your believe in their intrinsic worth, and act out of love only. This does not mean giving them every toy they want, but it does mean make sacrifices when you can for the best aspirations of your kids, and constantly showing them how much you appreciate them. Be sentimental and approachable. I think my kids knew I would have been no less their fan if they were D students.
2) They need you, give them all of you. Don't hold back and don't ever fake it with them. They know you; no double standards! If that movie is bad for your kids, parents can do without watching it. Schedule regular whole-family time and 1:1 time. Family dinners together are important.
3) Humor and curiosity are some of the best tools. Demonstrate them. Memorize funny poems, make music together, show how to take things apart, and keep it all upbeat, even crazy.
4) Don't let anyone else raise your kids. That includes daycare and school systems. I lean toward public school system over homeschooling, and it worked out for us, but that depended on what the system had to work with. Social development and problem solving is important. So are friends. Be involved parents, room mothers, etc. Know the kids in their K-6 classes; they end up on your doorstep asking for dates. Here's the tough part, but it proved extremely important: I barely made a living wage and my wife made more than me when we decided one would stay home. It was her call who would. I don't know if I would be able to look my kids in the eyes if we hadn't sacrificed.
5) Money incentives? Oh ya. Make cash match effort was my philosophy. They got a pittance for base allowances but kept job-journals as they learned to write and were richly rewarded for finding new ways to help. In school, the first A is the easiest, even hard not to get. That last A is a bear, it's the subject they don't like. My kids got $1 for the first A, and the pay doubled for each additional A. They nearly bankrupted me. Long term, the investment works out. The youngest just took her MCAT.
It also happens to be a very hands-on field.
Dammit! I knew my preference for theory would come back and bite me in the ass some day.
to ensure early hard disk corruption :-)
I needed to do well in school, not because I'd get some reward in 3 months, but because if I wanted to do what I want for the remainder of my life, I'd have to work to get there.
Dammit, I didn't discover programming until age 14, and I didn't really decide that was what I wanted to do with my life until age 20. But see also http://xkcd.com/519/ ;-)
This sort of program feeds into feelings of entitlement
Really? I think it'd communicate that "to receive X, you must do Y". Isn't that how the workplace works---you do the task your boss gives you, and you get paid. Isn't allowances more like "You deserve some money, here you go"?
action requires an immediate reward
I study now, I get paid later. How's that immediate?
Or am I misreading you?
this is far too much money to give kids of that age anyway. This age group would be happy with $5. Hell, my daughter's teacher once rewarded the class with sweets for a good test - the excitement this caused was amazing.
There will be problems because of this - too much of a big reward -> they will become demotivated as soon as they don't get $500. Then it'll be HELL for the parents & teachers.
If you're trying to produce people who can work together and be productive members of society then it makes sense to dock people that not followed rules which directly relate to that.
Then wouldn't it make sense not to take away their Math grade, which supposedly tells you about the student's math abilities, but instead add grading on those properties you think are important (work ethics, cooperativeness, etc.)? Then flunk them in work ethics if thy don't show up etc.
blind are we, if see not we could, the production of a clone army!
behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
Goodharts Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If you think this is bad in corporations, you should try working in Local Government some time...
Meta will eat itself
in school, having all four A's is better
I thought it was all about the three R's.
I figured that meant Rivest, Riemann and Röntgen. Turns out I was "Rong" again :(
Cue the 'Oh the poor poor children will cry themselves to sleep if we actually expect something more than attendance in school.' estrogen-high soccer moms.
I completely agree, but that wasn't what school taught me.
I graduated in 2005, and with the exception of Maths, school taught me a politically correct, baseless worldview. I was taught evolution is right because it is, white people mistreated black people because we do, and Shakespeare was either gay, liberal, or feminist depending upon what could be. I have since critically analysed what I was taught to reach my own conclusions.
It is little wonder people now do not know how to think, just how to agree.
The best thing I ever learned was _how_ I learn. I now recognise that I only remember a concept if I understand why it works. I taught myself this from learning logic and hacking, not from school.
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
I would argue that the internet would be far, far, far more of a destructive way to socialize someone than any public school.
My evidence: furries, livejournal, facebook, 4chan, 2girls1cup, tubgirl, and goatse.
Work that will be replaced by robots in 10-20 years (I'm not saying construction sites will be 100% robotic, there will be 5-10 employees on site but they won't be moving bricks around) should be looked down on, so people don't accidentally dedicate their lives to it.
and think we should stop paying everyone, such that they can find the joy of working for the work itself and not just the pay.
>Read "Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire" (Rafe Esquith, actual teacher in LA) and then
>tell me teachers can't make a difference with tactics other than paying for grades.
Instead, I shared two 7-hour plane rides with a high school teacher.
>Motivating students is great, but as soon as you remove the extrinsic motivation you end up with a lot
>of kids who have no intrinsic motivation to do anything they're not paid for.
Wow, just like real life!
>No volunteering, no helping out around the community, no smiling at people on the street.
Wow, just like real life!
>They work because they're paid, not because they have any desire to contribute to society in a
>positive manner or because they take any pleasure or pride in their work.
Wow, just like real life!
I do things I don't want to do because I get paid or receive some other kind of compensation. That's the way the world works in real life. Everything else I do because it's pleasurable. If it ain't fun, I ain't doing it unless there's something in it for me. Life's too short to volunteer for misery.
>Maybe if we brought better teachers on board FIRST, we wouldn't have to resort to such drastic
>measures to positively motivate kids to do what kids ought to be doing naturally -
>exploring the world around them.
As the father of two kids, I can tell you from experience that that is not what kids do naturally. What kids do naturally is be self-centered, hedonistic, selfish little beings. True, they will explore the world around them - while satisfying their self-centered, hedonistic, selfish instincts.
If you could craft an educational system that catered to their self-centered, hedonistic, selfish instincts, you'd probably have an excellent vehicle for conveying knowledge. But the fact is, learning is, for most of us, hard work and thus not terribly fun. Thus kids need other things besides pleasure to motivate them to learn. For me, it was fear of my parents' reprisals for failure to succeed academically that motivated me.
Again, as my teacher friend explained to me, you can get all the better teachers you want on board. Unless you have kids that are motivated BY SOMETHING to learn, it won't matter. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink unless he's motivated.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I agree, in a perfect world, we should all just want to learn, we should not have to pay for anything, and life should be good.
Real world here though, people need incentive to do stuff, nothing is free and nothing is ever just good!
I say whatever turns their crank, it could be money today, WoW credits tomorrow, and tacos thursday...
in the end, it is a proven effective model that WoW uses, and makes a bizillion dollars with, the interest of the game comes from the cool accomplishments, gear or talents that comes from putting in the hours on your character....should be the same in real life...
Trust me, go into the ghetto and tell them you will pay them to go to school, and based on a system they will get money, you will see the biggest movement since MMOS hit the net. A ghetto girl gets 5000$ through out her educational years...enough to
send her to college free for a few years.
But I think you need to face the possibility that some people are just 'dumb'
Conversely some are really 'smart'
Interesting thing is what the criteria is for this division. Ignoring the tiny 'dumb in every way' group - and without intentionally descending into schmaltz, surely the key is identify what people are good at/enjoy and allow them to follow that path from as young an age as possible.
By all means ensure there's a foundation of basic numeracy and literacy, but just seems quite quite bizarre to me how some subject seems to find themselves on a curriculum where I swear they've never been of any use to 99% of the countless millions that've studied them.
Had a slightly beery conversation a while back on this very topic, and concluded that glaciers are possibly the most pointlessly known topic.
I find education frustrating because each time I learn something new, there is another thing to learn after it. I'll probably die before I reach the end of my studies 50-60 years isn't long enough.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You know, I did a computing degree in Computer Science
That's the best kind of degree to do in Computer Science. I did a history of art degree in Computer Science, and I regret it to this day.
Education is the cornerstone of democracy and it's fantastic that we are setting our bar "high" (yeah, right) for our most precious resource - our future leaders. However, not everyone can be president.
"Welcome, graduates. You are no longer the future."
(Thanks, Simpsons.)
Because blue collar work, "working with your hands", is shunned and looked down at. You're getting dirty. You're using your body and not your brain.
Really?
Tradesmen have to know what they are doing and allot of their tasks require a fair bit of thinking.
I've worked in Retail, Logistics, Manufacturing and IT.
My last job as a truck driver saw me transporting goods into the city. I remember buying lunch from some posh, expensive cafe full of people wearing suits, I noticed a few snobby looks from a table of office girls, apparently steel-cap boots with a coating of dry cement are not the latest fashion. It's funny how office workers sometimes look down on "blue-collar" workers when we are often earning more money and your jobs require better train of thought than many of the office jobs around the city.
I do find this arrogance very amusing, some of the jobs I've done I can kill people if I'm not thinking, yet some worker who sits at a desk doing a job which requires minimal intellectual output looks down on my work.
I accept not all "White-collar" workers are like this, since I used to be one. However the few that are seems to draw attention to themselves.
All up I think Manufacturing (Production-line) was the worst job, that was a brain-dead got nowhere job. I left on the second day. Retail is ok, but pretty boring at times. IT required more thinking than retail, got better pay but can be repetitive. Logistics (Driving Trucks) requires the highest amount of thinking, at least with the jobs I do. It is also the most physical work and the best paid.
People who look down on trades are just arrogant fools who don't know what they are talking about, some of the most successful people I know practice a trade.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Yeah, but don't forget that the Deltas make a difference.
Also, I hear they like to walk all over the Epsilons. But in fairness, the Epsilons are very small.
It's rather funny you speak of internship, because i consider these the biggest scam of all. There are two types of internships. First is that they expect you to perform like one of their regular employee, only difference is that you get paid a fraction of what regular employees get paid. The second is that they don't teach you anything because you only have so long in the company, so they ask you to do administrative tasks such as data entry and paper filing. In those you don't learn anything. People in career service department are much much worse than most companies' HR departments. If you even look at them the wrong way, kiss good bye to your new opportunities, because they just won't give you anything good and/or withhold things you applied. While there are laws and regulations against companies/HR doing such things, there are none for career counselors. To be honest, you are much better off posting your resume on monster rather than going through school.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
You'll find the office workers disappearing first.
They already are in my city, I deliver to office buildings and they are certainly quieter with companies now trying to reduce their costs. Allot of office staff will be replaced by software, in fact allot have already but until robots reach sufficient AL they cannot yet take over the building site.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
OH MY GOD is that poorly written.
There's the idiot who wrote it for the New York Post and the idiot who wrote it up for slashdot.
Three of biggest examples of the idiocy, in reverse order of stupidity:
1) The story is not about kids scores going up by 40 points. The story is about the percentage of kids "passing" the test going up by 40 points. If a lot of kids are near-but-below the passing mark, scores could go up by just a couple of points and yield a 40% increase in the passing rate. (Obviously, an extreme way to make the point, but there clearly was nothing like a 40 point increase by the kids).
2) Sample size. That almost-40% number is just at one school. Any one who knows anything about statistics and/or testing knows that small schools are the most likely to see wide swings, showing the greatest gains in passing rate and the greatest losses. One of two schools cited in the story has about 65 kid/grade. That's a small school, even by the "small school" standard. The other school also has less than 100 kid/grade. If you don't understand this stuff, you should not be writing about testing or statistics of any sort.
3) Why doesn't the story report the overall impact? Why doesn't the story report the overall increase in the participating schools compared to the rest of the city? I don't mean controlling for factors, just a straight comparison? (I'll tell you why: a quarter of the school showed LESS improvement in math and a third showed less improvement in reading. At least the story mentioned that.) We all know that scores were up city-wide.
I'm not even getting into testing issues, pedagogical issues, developmental issues or the sustainability of these gains. I am just talking about the reporting.
Discipline is just as important in making it in life as the 3R's. Sometimes it's just as important what you wont do than what you will do. Grades being fairly high in all classes does show to a future prospective employer that you might show up on time. Just getting out of bed a making to the job is half of the work.
When, I went to K through 12 showing up could affect your grades. When I went to college, things changed, and most of the time if you knew the material and just showed up to take the test, you would get a good grade. Now, college is like high school basically because the government will not fund tardiness. I'm not sure about private schools as I never could afford one and it didn't seem to help your chances of finding work. Liberal Art's and things like that are worthless here.
Of course all of this dumbing down has been lead by the Teacher's Union which is in bed with the Left. They have succeeded in dumbing down the American people enough that America will now go along unaware as we socialize the country. Those of us with college degrees and good jobs, of course, will foot the bill.
--I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.--
I honestly think you are wrong. I'll show you why.
--In fact, I'd probably fail most 7th grade exams.--
Not if you studied. I probably still couldn't pass one.
--something I picked up from books while going to school.--
So that English you took was worth something after all.
While you may have forgotten most of the details, what college did was make you a well rounded problem solver. I have seen people that have more technical ability than I do at work for the same job, but they just took technical classes at a technical college. They can't even begin to do all of things I can because some of it had to be invented. If they run into something they haven't seen before, they have no idea how to find the answers. I agree some of it was BS. We'll so is some work. I'm actually grateful for some of those BS classes. Now I have an improved BS detector because of it. Also, your 3.7 GPA taking classes that you are not interested in shows discipline.
--I'd go so far as to say the *vast majority* of students are not learning for any particular reason at all. In the lower grades, they do what they are told. By college, most of the students, particularly the ones that are going to graduate - have selected a major that is going to lead to a job that will both pay their bills and be tolerable.--
All of this is sad but true, but it doesn't mean that can't go into it without a plan. I do not think that you can just take the stuff that you are going to use at your job and get by later that way, especially if your job involves problem solving. I had good teachers and bad ones. I had to learn how to deal with the bad ones. At first I didn't appreciate this, but now I've kinda got a little different outlook on it. This even taught how to deal with bad situations at work and in life as well.
With the possibility of public schools handing out tax dollars to students. As it is, I don't go to public school or have any kids and don't think I have any business paying for it. As it is, most public schools spend over $10,000 a year on each student. For around half that, you could give a child a quality private education. As with most things, if you want to pay more and get worse results, get the government involved.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Now, I'd be lying if I said I'm unhappy that my "brainy" work of programming and IT administration is better paid than plumbing and bricklaying. Hey, even I am a little selfish. I just don't understand it. If you'd ask me what's harder, it's a no brainer. On one hand pushing a few buttons on a keyboard, on the other lugging around a few 100 pounds of cement and bricks...
It's about ability. Not everyone can do brain work, no matter how hard they try. That's why it commands a premium in price.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
about derivatives
I honestly think you are wrong. I'll show you why.
There was no show in your response. There was no why. There was only your interpretation, and that involved not much more than the ability to problem-solve in a generic way which proved the GP's point. You jumped directly from the GP's grades 1-12 setting (7th was the actual number given) to a college/university setting. And those tend to be vastly different learning environments.
While you may have forgotten most of the details, what college did was make you a well rounded problem solver
To me, it seems the problem is not in the universities and colleges, but in the lower grades. Those grades where you "do what you're told." The biggest problem with being constantly told what to do, is that you don't really see the point in thinking for yourself, and will instead tend to rely on others to get anything done. That's where the college kids who are still in the "do what you're told" mindset run into problems. Critical thinking and problem solving aren't things that can be memorized, they have to be learned, understood, and applied.
As a former public school student, I see how my entire early educational life was spent being considered as not much more than another faceless meat-bag that couldn't (or wasn't allowed to) reason its way out of an empty room with no windows and a single, open door with what we were expected to "learn." In fact, even some of my university instructors held the mindset that their students were incapable of rational thought and were devoid of any significant problem-solving skills. All of the understanding, BS detection, and true reasoning I've come to use regularly came from the time spent out of the classroom during those early years. That time spent with my parents and other adults that I had contact with taught me all of that. The only thing I learned from other children I regularly had contact with was how to act like a child and how to rely on others to do all of my thinking and as much of my work for me... and how to be belittled and picked on by my peers for trying to put into practice those skills I picked up from the adults in my life.
So that English you took was worth something after all.
I'll go out on a limb and say that the GP learned to understand the common language in use in that area, but I'll guarantee that most of that learning wasn't classroom-related. We tend to learn more by what we're exposed to at home than what we learn in school. Things like word usage and sentence construction come more from home and family life than from a classroom.
There's always extensive internet research, and the, uh, journals.
What is the big deal about paying kids for good grades? Parents do it all the time $20 per A, $10 per B. So the school is doing now SO WHAT!! I wish they did this while I was in school I would have applied my self allot more. Most children do not/can not see properly into the future. They donâ(TM)t plan for the future the way we do. If we give them a reason to sit through these boring as hell classes other then you need this to get a job, then I'm all for it. I would say that 98% of adults who have any degree will tell you that they did not get their degree because they love learning, they got it so they could advance in their current position or get a better position i.e. MORE MONEY!!!!!! The only difference is with the kids is thatâ(TM)s its more short term then long term
--Things like word usage and sentence construction come more from home and family life than from a classroom.--
This may as be. My mom did by me a lot of books. I didn't really have contact with the public until I was exposed to them at school.
OK I misunderstood. I totally agree with your assessment of K-12, but not if it applies to college. I always thought that an education was one of the most important things to have, however it can be obtained.
--In fact, even some of my university instructors held the mindset that their students were incapable of rational thought and were devoid of any significant problem-solving skills.--
An opinion that I have is that may be what it seemed like to you, but do you really know what they thought. I'm sure you know what they did. Did you ever go back and talk to some of these people later on? That can give you a different perspective.
--We tend to learn more by what we're exposed to at home than what we learn in school.--
Very true.
--Critical thinking and problem solving aren't things that can be memorized, they have to be learned, understood, and applied.--
I think you proved that by having such a high GPA. Critical thinking, I agree, but not all problems are solved by that.
--and how to be belittled and picked on by my peers for trying to put into practice those skills I picked up from the adults in my life.--
Those were the athletes, that are now cops. A little older but the bullies back the are still the same. They belittle and pick on or worse anything they don't understand, and they don't understand a lot.
---
All I'm saying, is don't underrate your college education. If I know what you do without a degree, do I get a job like yours? I don't think so. Just taking only the classes that apply to your job, interests, or whatever I don't think is enough. I think you have to be able to get through the stuff you don't like too. Maybe history, government, health or whatever that is required at that college. Of course I went to a small college with small classroom sizes. It was more hands on. I thought my education was defective at first in my field. Then I saw all of these others getting jobs for just taking a 2 year class at ITT tech or something else like that. It doesn't seem to matter about their parents or their parents are pretty much the same, but those people can't accomplish anything without help. The usual excuse they have is: "We didn't do it that way in school or where I worked last time." I'm telling them are you in school now or where you worked last time. Give the people paying you results not excuses.
Most schools do this. I've not heard of anyone docking a math grade for being disruptive in class. Maybe I'm a little too distant from it all by my niece in school right now gets grades on all the things you mention.
This isn't about the kids who perform better. It's about the schools who by essentially bribing students to study for specific tests, show higher test scores, qualifying them for increased aid under NCLB.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
Okay, so a third-party agency now has to motivate kids to get their grades up?
Man, when I was a kid, your *parents* did that.
They had a variety of methods. Some parents offered money for As and Bs. Some parents *charged* money for Ds and Fs. Some did both. Some parents used other forms of positive encouragement and/or other penalties for failure. A lot of kids just sort of *assumed* their parents would be upset if they flunked, and labored to avoid finding out any further details. Others wanted their parents to be proud of them, and were willing to work for it.
What all of these things have in common is this: the kids all knew that their parents *cared* about their grades, *and* the kids all knew that they personally were considered to be responsible for said grades.
Our parents used to help us with our homework, too. Well, okay, most of the time all they really had to do was remind us that we actually had to sit down and do it, now, before we could go play. But parents *did* this. And they made it stick, too. I was there. I remember. I didn't *like* doing homework, but I did it anyway. I had to.
What has happened to our culture? It's broken.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Not sure how the mods missed your sarcasm? My sarcasm meter went through the roof!
I, for one, know that I can easily do most any kind of programming, but 2 days at a construction site would certainly kill me.
So which one was the one again that can't be done by anyone?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those were the athletes, that are now cops. A little older but the bullies back the are still the same. They belittle and pick on or worse anything they don't understand, and they don't understand a lot.
The ones who picked on me weren't just the athletes. Oh, they sometimes got in on the fun as well, but the majority of the ridicule came from the majority of students who couldn't be bothered to actually ask questions and didn't care about anything other than getting the instructor's attention away from them. It wasn't until I hit college that I didn't have to always be wary of people trying to get close to me; trying to get close so they could do more damage to my self-esteem or my physical well-being. Most of the kids in my school had no problem laughing at the kid who asked questions in class, and they had no problems with ridiculing anyone who actually wanted to understand the material being taught. Nor did they have much of a problem in providing slapstick entertainment for nearby students while in the hallways at the expense of the inquisitive student.
Some of the instructors who actually enjoyed teaching and desired to help the students who wanted to learn couldn't easily counteract that level and type of environmental pressure. From my understanding, that environment has only become worse over time as many of the students entering college now seem to expect to just breeze through whatever classes they take, and if they can't because the instructor won't let them, they just find another instructor who teaches the course the next semester. These are the same students willing to take the work of others and claim it as their own, then complain that they get treated unfairly when they get caught (yes, this happened to me; yes, the instructor caught the offender; and yes, I aced that class).
An opinion that I have is that may be what it seemed like to you, but do you really know what they thought. I'm sure you know what they did. Did you ever go back and talk to some of these people later on? That can give you a different perspective.
Frighteningly, I was actually told, by a professor, directly to my face, that I was incapable of making decisions that concerned my beliefs and my understanding of the world around me. That he would tell me when I was ready to make such decisions. This was in my senior year of my BS degree, and the instructor was one for a required course. Another instructor (the department head for the entire CS program) actually told me that those in my major weren't really being taught the field; that we were only there for the "Computer Science Experience," and not to expect that to change. I had, for years by that point, made a point to discuss the classes with my instructors, and the only saving grace was that I had a few actually competent and caring instructors and I managed to make a decent showing by avoiding those who didn't care about anything more than the paycheck, the power, and the prestige.
All I'm saying, is don't underrate your college education. If I know what you do without a degree, do I get a job like yours? I don't think so.
Oh, I fully appreciate my college education -- or at least, the piece of paper that came with it -- it's what allowed me to qualify for the job I now have. Granted, I learned very little of the field I studied from the actual coursework, and more from my own interests and on-the-job training. And the work that went into getting that piece of paper didn't actually do anything to prepare me for a real working environment where all of those models and theories that are expected to be put into practice but usually aren't. The problem came when I actually had to have the piece of paper before I would even be considered for a job like what I currently hold. The policies in place for most employers I've tried to find work with tend to ignore anyone who doesn't meet their minimum requirements, and that's a Bachelo
I think your example doesn't explain why worker#1 is unhappy with his employer. He's unhappy because of a double standard.
If there are rules at a company, then they should be obeyed. None of this hoccus pocus nonsense about "it doesn't matter if they break the rules, as long as they get the results".
I'm fine with a person doing things their way. But when they get special treatment for whatever reason, then I have a problem with it. Let me cite a few examples of things that supposedly warrant special treatment.
-Social people. Favors for that employee/student you enjoy talking to, makes you laugh, that kind of crap.
-People that "get the results".
-Taller people. Yes, it's been proven. Same with good looking people.
-Demographic requirements. I've seen this first hand at the university I'm at. They literally allow illiterate students entrance, hoping to teach them English along the way, just to not appear that they are favoring the white minority, that oddly enough is more literate. I feel sorry for the lecturers that have to read their crap.
-Attractive females.
-Witty people.
-"Connected people".
Okay, some of those examples are just people gaming the system, but they're still wrong. They all get preferential treatment over the average person.
Actually, what you're missing is that smaller class size -> less teacher pay. The teachers, want both more pay and smaller classes, but given the trade off they inevitably choose more pay. Some individuals would choose otherwise, but they don't control the union negotiating teams. There is the confounding issue that some buildings have all classrooms utilized, so more students -> larger class size because there isn't anywhere else to put them, but the first dynamic definitely plays a part.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
I'd say that teachers/instructors should also benefit from the performance of their students by way of test-based bonuses. Their students do well, they do well. Their students do poorly, they don't get the bonus and now have more incentive to ensure that their students can learn the material come the next test cycle.
It's not that difficult to understand how a rewards-based system will show results. Unfortunately it doesn't fit in too well with the Socialistic format of the school system that says "it doesn't matter how well you or your peers do, you all get the same pittance and you should feel honored that you get to participate and we give you anything at all." I'd prefer a more Capitalistic approach, where you earn more when you work harder. This cash-for-grades approach is also better suited to showing how hard work can pay off.
You think that a construction worker will be replaced by a robot before you're replaced by a script?
Snideness aside. Robots are expensive, inefficient and quite prone to repairs, not to mention that they're far from mass production quality levels. Software is the opposite. Fairly inexpensive, efficient and, after some debugging, runs 'til the machine it runs on croaks.
So I'd say it's more likely that office work will vanish before construction work does.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Operant conditioning is a fine topic for a psych 101 class.
Fortunately, it's not how human beings actually think and behave, in most cases. Most people are far more complicated than that.
Yes - $ for grades will instill a perverse morality, and create a fairly coin-operated cohort of students. But then again, what sort of society are they going to be living in? The question is: will these kids be able to rise above these values they're being taught, and understand that life is about more than money? The answer is: school would be far from the only place this "value" is being thrown at them. Who's teaching them other values, and which message is louder?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When you first said you learned JCL, COBOL and C, I thought you were going to say you went to college back in the 80s. However, your first job was in .Net? Were you in college for over 10 years, or was your college really behind?
In Japan, around the 6th or 8th grade, I forgot, based on your average, you go to different classes. This is where the 'idiots' get grouped up. My point is, that separation happens pretty early over there, and those in the 'lower' class almost always end up in the lower households. I would be curious to see some actual statistics though.
Ok, ok - mind you it *was* a Batchelor of Arts.
Yes, I have a BA in Computer Science.
(A note arrived one day, asking me to tick a box for what kind of degree I wanted, BA or BSc, and the default was BA - I like defaults, so I stuck that. Or maybe I was a bit too, I don't know, stoned? After all, what were punched cards for? And if you don't know, clearly you missed some good times)
"Cats like plain crisps"
There are almost 7 billion people in the world. Not surprising there's quite a lot of information been gathered over time.
"End of [your] studies" - pah!
"Cats like plain crisps"
I got my degrees in a liberal arts school... I love learning for learning's sake... but until we figure out how to instill a value for education in our children (even if just a drive to get a degree in one field for the sake of work)... payment will have to suffice.
What school system are you referring too? The ones I deal with in Virginia have SOL's that they are required to pass before they are promoted. Also have IEP for those "idiots" you speak of to improve them.
The real issue is age and maturity. Classrooms are full of people of differing maturity levels and ages. It is one of the worst problems is that during the highest growth for children that we group them into year age groups. My son is born Dec 30th which means that most of the time the people he plays sports with are at LEAST a half year older or more and so he is behind in the maturity and social levels of the system. What do parents do? They hold the child back a year and place them in kindegarden late. What this causes is the reverse affect, now their child is almost a year older than the others in the class and maturity levels.
Up until a child is late teens, Age and Maturity play a huge factor in learning. Having Tiered classes based on age models will greatly assist in socializing and learning for the kids. Tiered sports can happen now. Plenty of discussion on it.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
If being dumb meant you were cool, wouldn't all the kids want to be in the dumb class, since that's where all the cool kids are?
Really? I think it'd communicate that "to receive X, you must do Y". Isn't that how the workplace works---you do the task your boss gives you, and you get paid. Isn't allowances more like "You deserve some money, here you go"?
Not necessarily. In some workplaces, you get paid the same for doing more or less work. Reward isn't normally on a regular basis for working extra. Namely: I work extra hard so when the opportunity for a promotion comes up, I'm more likely to get it (say 2-3+ years, not months in). Yes, there's the regularly "expected" reward of your salary... but the bigger goals are irregular and require preparation and (hopefully) a better track record than everyone else.
I study now, I get paid later. How's that immediate?
Immediate in this sense is: 6 weeks. Good thing about time is that it's all relative. Big rewards come after years... not weeks, not months. I've seen a good chunk of newbs come into the workplace and get frustrated that they aren't immediately making what the folks that've been there 15+ years are making.
Ok, put it this way. A lot more people are able to do construction work than are able to do programming work.
I'm sure I could do either type of work, but that it would take me a lot longer to learn how to do the programming work.
If you think that 2 days at a construction site would kill you, perhaps you should be getting more exercise.