School/grades - are your expectations high?

[Blonde Lawyer]

I think an important thing parents need to keep in mind today is that school and grades are handled completely differently than when we were kids.  When I was a kid, F was failing, D was below average, C was average, B was above average and A was excellent.  The class was graded on a curve.  Teachers were expected to have some above average and some below average kids but the majority of the class should be average.  My parents would be thrilled if I brought home straight B's. 

Now, the teaching criteria has changed, in part due to no child left behind.  Gone are the days where some kids will work fast food for life and some will be doctors.  Teachers are required to believe that every child can be a doctor.  They are supposed to have kids with all A's and all B's.  Under the new regime, a B really isn't that good anymore and A's are no longer rare.  I don't think I can compare my school experience to what my hypothetical children will experience.

With that understanding, I don't think I will be as accepting of C's as my parents were.  I disagree with this model of teaching personally.  I think tracked classes make sense so that teachers can teach to a higher level for some and lower level to others.  Teach to ability rather than standards.  Now, I expect the smartest are bored out of their mind and the dumbest are always struggling to keep in line. More kids are going to college that have no desire to work jobs that require college degrees.  Voc professions are no longer promoted and they are still lucrative and a great mustachian choice for many kids.  But, it is the world we live in. 

[mxt0133]

A lot of people have touch up on the matter already, which is grades have become the goal vs knowledge and mastery of that knowledge.  Everyone in the school/college eco system as picked up on that.  Kids know it is all about the grades that will get them into the right colleges, that in turn will get their foot in the door to the most sought after employers.  The high achievers spend more time learning test taking skills than the actual subject matter. 

Parents know this as well so they game the system by red shirting their kids, getting medical evaluations for them so they can be diagnosed with some form of ADD so that the kids get IEPs and allow them more time for tests.  They put them in the right extra curricular activities and sign them up for volunteer activities to pad their college entrance applications.

Teachers are even in on this because their jobs and bonuses are tied to student grades.  So what would any rational teacher do, teach to the test.  Even go as far as changing test answers so that the state doesn't take over their school district because they know no matter how hard they try their students have more things to worry about when they come to school hungry, emotionally distraught, or worried about their safety.

From there the colleges professors grade on a curve even tough the average is 40% on a final.  No professor would last a semester if more than half of their students fail because well he's just not an effective teacher, even tough they give him 100 students to teach physics where a lot of the students don't even know how to do algebra let alone calculus.

[Kitsune]

As a counterpoint to this, I'll share my experience from the opposite perspective. My required writing class was the only class in my first year of college that I did not get an A in, despite a large effort on my part. All my other classes were honors math/science/engineering courses, with objective grading criteria. I was angry not as much out of a sense of failure, as that I missed an extra $500 that my uni gave to students who had a perfect GPA at the end of the year.

To this day I read regularly and can write just fine - concisely, and backed by facts. What I couldn't do was suck up to my writing adjunct in class discussions, aka parroting her liberal hogwash. I had absolutely no respect for a woman who, among other things,

• was obese, and still chose to bring in a bucket-sized iced coffee from Dunkin every class
• told us to read penises into the essays we analyzed

Heh.

I took a linguistics/anthropology course when I was working towards my degree. The anthropology professor made the absolute dumbest claim I have ever heard in person coming out of an academic's mouth. It was that because we call childbirth 'labor', it negatively charges the event of childbirth, making us think of toiling in the fields or some other backbreaking effort and that if we got away from this word, it would make us think more positively about it and have less pain and the actual reality of childbirth wouldn't real anymore and all other matter of BS. I, and pretty much no one else in the class, took her seriously after that.

... Wow. I assume she'd never given birth, huh. WOW.

I'd absolutely rather toil in a field than give birth, assuming the end result was the same. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of ways to get a baby out of a stomach...

(And, to the first poster: someone's weight doesn't actually impact their competence. You can criticize pretty much anything else, but that comment makes you sound like an ass. Try to be better, for crying out loud).

[galliver]

From there the colleges professors grade on a curve even tough the average is 40% on a final.  No professor would last a semester if more than half of their students fail because well he's just not an effective teacher, even tough they give him 100 students to teach physics where a lot of the students don't even know how to do algebra let alone calculus.

In all fairness, professors have different approaches to testing. My personal favorite is long, challenging homeworks and very straightforward cases of the material represented on the exam. Because then as a student you are struggling with the challenging cases, the unusual functions, combining your knowledge in novel ways. But on the test, you are tested on the fundamentals of the class that really just answer the question "Did you learn the concepts and techniques of X topic in Y class?"

Some profs, however, will give hard hws and hard exams, or the worst, easy hws and hard exams. Hard can mean extremely long, so that even a great student can't thoughtfully and carefully complete all problems within the allotted time (be that 2-3 hours or several days for a take-home). Hard can mean involving a lot of external information or creative, novel thought. By which I mean: I took a math class where we covered a technique that required knowing the expression for the zeros of a function. We practiced it with sines and cosines. We practiced it with a few other periodic functions that have readily available formulas for the zeros. On the (take home) exam, the technique needed to be used with a function I had never seen before in my LIFE and could not find (either by solving for, or in a book/website) an expression for the zeros. I was very mad, because I couldn't demonstrate my knowledge of the material covered in class due to a lack of knowledge of something completely outside its scope. (There were several other instances of this on the exam; one problem would not have made me so mad.) As to my other point about novel thought: my friends and I recently went through a round of sharing and solving brain teasers; I'm sure you know the type...you think about the problem on and off for a few hours, or maybe a few days, and suddenly you make a leap of logic and the whole thing seems trivial in retrospect. But you can't predict how long that leap of logic will take for a person. These are excellent for training someone to think unconventionally...but in my opinion problems or questions requiring such a leap do not belong on exams. Unless it was a brain teaser class, I suppose.

So the prof with the 40% average? His test was too long. Or his homeworks were too easy. Or he assumed his students knew calculus, even though that wasn't listed as a prerequisite for the course. There are a lot of teacher-side potential reasons for such low scores; and also some justification for interpreting them into high grades.

[KisKis]

Setting an expectation for 100s in elementary school is reasonable, at least in my school district.  High school is a little tougher, and I hope the classes will be hard enough to be a challenge, but if they end up relatively easy, I will probably set expectations high again.  I think if you know your child's personality and capabilities, and you read over the homework being given at school, you should be able to decide where you want to set the bar.  If my son is less academically inclined than my daughter, I will use a different method with him.  Parenting is definitely not one size fits all. 

Once in a while, my daughter will make a careless mistake, and I always just jokingly ask her, "What happened?!"  She explains what she did wrong and how she will avoid making the same mistake the next time.  Good enough for me.  If there is anything she has a tougher time with, or if there is any topic she seems particularly interested in, we supplement at home and encourage extra study in that area.

I grew up with a tiger mom and my husband grew up with the total opposite, but we both ended up at the same Top 10 University, so I am trying to loosen up and go with the more pleasant method.  All our siblings also were academically successful.  Maybe it's just genetic and what I do doesn't matter at all.  One can hope.  In the end, I want my children to be self-motivated.  I don't want to be their motivation.  They need to be able to set their own standards and also learn to accept results.  My role is to be supportive and always be available to help, but not to do it for them.  I am focused more on teaching them proper habits, rather than giving them grief about any arbitrary grading.  Grades are just one type of benchmark.       

[neo von retorch]

I think so many of these "expectations" are wrong :-) I don't want to incite riots, but let's think about this for a second. (You can check out Carol Dweck's "Mindset" or anything from Alfie Kohn to expand on these ideas.)

High marks in elementary school are pretty easy to achieve. The problem is that, already, the goal is high marks. And they are the theoretical indicator of learning, growth and attitude towards learning/achievement. As school gets more difficult, some kids will start to get lower marks. What do you think they will think and feel at this point? "I'm not as smart as I thought. I thought it was easy to get high marks. Now I am failing but not getting those same marks."

What is the alternative? Minimize the focus on grades / marks as much as possible (within the archaic system as it currently works.) When school is easy, they will have extra curiosity and desire for learning. Help them find ways to use that curiosity and discover new ways to challenge their minds and learn things outside of the narrow school system. Have them hit challenges that are not trivially easy to surpass, and help them learn how to persevere and overcome. Help them see mistakes as common, but readily useful in the learning process.

We don't know what direction our public school system will take next. Attempts to govern an education system for a population of over 300 million with one set of rules and financial rewards for success (and punishment for failure) is clearly not doing our children any favors. I believe any successful children just show the resilience of humanity and natural curiosity, and the care and nurturing of responsible parents despite the sub-optimal national system. I think parents should take any chance to interact with teachers and administrators to steer the conversation away from grades and see what their opinions are as insiders in the system, and share your own opinions, and hope that the future of this "system" can be executed more successfully than it is now.

[rocketpj]

Expectations vary at different ages.  I expect my 11 year old to make a solid effort at any projects and at the work in class.  He gets good grades - except in music - and takes pride in doing well.  If he gets the occasional 'B' I ask him and the teacher about it, but I'm not going to get upset about it.

Our current education system is just barely preparing them to work in the modern age.  Most of what they learn is useless outside of school, and even some of the social stuff (about learning how to sit still and watch the clock) I don't like.

I want my kids to learn how to think and behave intelligently and creatively in as adaptable a manner as possible.  Because 'work' in 20 or 30 years is going to be very different from what it is now.  To have a chance they need to learn how to work hard and adapt, but none of us have any real idea of what they will actually need to thrive in that time period.

As for the boy in Grade 1, I expect him to put in a good effort and to be respectful, empathetic and kind with his friends.  So far so good.