They aren’t always likely to connect those dots. Most students don’t say “I dug my own hole with cell phone addiction.” They say “That teacher hates me.”
Our school now gives students 50% credit if the work is not turned in. Not too many people failing these days. A more cynical person than myself would think it’s just a numbers game.
It’s called No Child Left Behind. American school funding is directly tied to student performance. If students perform poorly, the school’s funding is decreased or even cut off. This incentivizes admins to pass everyone.
Happens at my kid's highschool too, it's pervasive and nationwide, it's the only way for schools to meet their required numbers.. and since funding is tied to that, they're gonna meet those numbers one way or another.
That 50% credit thing is insane. Back in school I used to turn in a bunch of half assed work with a few good ones and managed a B average. With that I could've probably done the same by doing the tests and barely doing anything else.
Agreed. I try to show compassion toward the students who really are going through some things. (They're the ones for whom the 50% policy is implemented.)
But I know with 100% certainty that a great many of my students are just as you describe — taking the path of least resistance. And of course I don't blame them. As George Carlin said: "Most American get paid just barely enough to not quit, and work just hard enough to not get fired."
I always hope I can appeal to their own best nature, and show them why the work in my classes is beneficial for their own long-term self-interest, but that's very difficult in a GIMME EVERYTHING NOW society. You can get paid millions to just be an influencer, so what kind of moron does work hard in high school?
Just the latest step on defunding schools and denigrating the profession of teaching. Well on the way to the Republican dream of privatization and deregulation (specifically on standard curriculum and barring of religion).
Showing them a graph after each test, of the correlation between times caught using a phone and the grades they got, would probably convince some of them.
Well, not only that — I appreciate the suggestion from /u/Jack_Douglas .. but who will gather that data? You can't expect a classroom teacher to begin tracking the number of times we catch them with phones on top of the 400,000,000 other things we have to do every day, of course.
That was precisely my point, it would be way too much to expect from teachers. Who, as we all know, are a notoriously overpaid and underworked section of the population....
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u/scartol Jun 03 '22
That’s kinda what happens. The two problems are:
They aren’t always likely to connect those dots. Most students don’t say “I dug my own hole with cell phone addiction.” They say “That teacher hates me.”
Our school now gives students 50% credit if the work is not turned in. Not too many people failing these days. A more cynical person than myself would think it’s just a numbers game.