Can I have 50% of my salary for doing 0% of my work?

After following a friend who joined XHS after the initial tiktok ban a year or so ago, I started to notice this trend of Chinese people calling American education "happy education" and I bristled a bit because I didn't find it all that happy. But as I see more and more people point out things like this, how the No Child Left Behind policy was implemented, how resources are diverted away from actually educating children... I kinda get it.

To be fair, I think the Chinese also have a biased lens here since their school days are like twelve hours long, I'm sure 7 AM to 3 PM seems more like daycare in comparison. But I think there's some truth in the mockery.

This doesn't apply to doctoral programs which really just seem like abuse and trauma factories. I don't know a single happy, well adjusted doctor.

This is by design. MAGA wants kids to be stupid, only stupid people vote MAGA.

"I love the poorly educated" DJT

COVID fucked up my kids education so badly they are still trying to catch up. They were in 3rd and 4th grade in 2020, so they lost those prime reading comprehension lessons. But at the same time the schools failed to catch the students up and now they are struggling and instead of helping them they just push them along and pass the buck to the next grade.

I think the whole idea of grading kids like they're show dogs is pretty gross in the first place. "Welcome to the world, kiddo, the first thing you need to learn is that we're here to judge you, and if you don't bark on command you will be deemed to be a failure."

Fuck that shit.

This would've been a godsend to me tbh. I was really bad about completing buzywork homework assignments but I paid attention in class and already understood the material. In high school I'd ace every test and wind up with a C or worse because of the number of missing assignments, it wasn't even intentional, I just frequently forgot about them because they weren't interesting and probably because of some kind of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Of course, there are also kids who might struggle to complete assignments due to complicated home lives.

I don't think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless. A 50 is still going to hurt you, it just doesn't drag your grade into oblivion. If a student gets 100 on three assignments and misses a fourth, is a grade of 75 really the most accurate representation of how well they understand the material? Counting the incomplete as a 50 would make that an 87.

Sprinkling in zeros can really drag your grade down and can make it feel like your grade doesn't really have much to do with your understanding of the material, and has more to do with being willing and able to work outside of school hours (or to just copy down answers from a friend five minutes before class, which I also didn't do).

currently have a stack of students' academic records on my desk, the state of grading in the U.S. is just insane. I hate GPA with a burning passion. Very talented kids burn themselves out over a number that might as well be set arbitrarily, because schools do some very fucky math to inflate their numbers, and they all seem to do the math differently. Why do they do this math? Well, it's because they're allergic to giving out grades lower than a C, so their entire scale would cease to function if they didn't heavily weight different classes over others. It's like a tower of self-caused problems.

Problem is that the school-to-prison pipeline is a very real thing and kids that are held back or don't finish school are far more likely to end up in prison than those that finish. The way school systems work in most of the US, the differences in outcomes for those with and without a high school diploma are stark and depressing. Finishing is as important as the education itself.

Read: End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale

So if you didn't study and you're confident you'll get less than 50%, it's better to not show up at all than to attempt the test?

I sympathize with this.

As a kid, I'd do the homework, put it in my backpack (thanks to my Mom), yet I'd completely forget to turn it in, despite the whole class getting up to do it, and get a 0%. Turning it in later for ~50% (thanks to sympathetic and confused teachers) saved my butt.

...And yes, I'm definitely neurodivergent.

Now ask, what a student should get, who did their assignment but only got 30%!

Personally, I think a UBI-based society can do education better. Everyone should receive a UBI income by default, but working a job or being educated will replace the UBI with a larger amount of money. Grades for learning boosts income based on how good they are. An S-Grade student gets twice of what UBI brings in. 'Real' jobs start at twice the value of the S-grade student.

This means that students can go to college and get paid for it. While the prospect of the workplace can be alluring in a fiscal sense, a college student can stay in college for as long as they need to git good, to be fulfilled, or simply to pass time while waiting for a decent job opening. They aren't held hostage by debts.

Kids also get paid for their grades. This encourages them to learn, because there are material rewards for doing so.

IMO, fiscal responsibility is a skill that is learned, and in America, we don't teach kids how to handle money. Instead, they get the bulk of their fiscal learning when it is almost time to be kicked out of the nest. Which is dumb.

Grades have always been meaningless.

People who believe in meritocracy and all that bullshit are just too privileged to notice.

edit: I didn't even realize this was "white people twitter" but makes sense 100%.

I grew up in an era when they didn't pass kids to get rid of them. This is why I had a friend in the 8th grade who had two kids.

I had a math teacher that would assign 100+ long division problems every night and then give you a 0 if you skipped more than 3 of them.

I'd have had a 4.0 if i got a 50% for not doing my work.

Because no child left behind worked out so well... Here we are having the same idiotic argument 25 years later.

Admins like that are treasonous to the lives they're supposed to be preparing for autonomous-living.

& need be eradicated from education.

No matter what their rank.

School-board types who sabotage learner-opportunity/potential, admins, principals, teachers, processes, policies, proceedures, I don't care what the saboteur is: rip it out & replace it with what is loyal to the learners' lives & potential & opportunity.

If that means segregating the intentionally-ignorant & the bullies from the majority of learners, then do it.

( still bitter over how I wasn't allowed calculus when I was in grade-8 & 9, because the institutional-process dictated I wait, then brain-injury robbed my ability to finish learning algebra, a couple years later.

I COULD HAVE HAD IT IN MY LIFE, but for their "process" regime.

fuckers. )

_ /\ _

This misses the point of grades being a stupid system in the first place. The very idea that people should be numbered and ranked is so readily accepted that we only dare consider how to do it correctly.

The truth is that essays should not be graded at all, because there should be no such thing as grading in the first place.

And what if they try and get <50%? This means the system is promoting those who invested nothing and don’t even try.

The first problem is that we're conflating Executive function with Knowledge.

If you get a 50 because you didn't understand the material, that's different from not doing or turning in the work.

I'm dealing with this now. The kid turns in his work, gets A's and B's, takes his test, and gets A's. His actual work in school is all A's, B's and 0's

He's learning, he knows the material. He can't hold focus, loses the paper, gets embarrassed if it gets a wrinkle, doesn't turn it in, and won't keep an organized folder.

He gets behind enough that he starts staying up late to finish the work and ends up falling asleep in class. We mediate with the teachers, stand over him to get him to do the work. Try to get him to keep it up once he's out of our sight. We get back on even keel again 2 weeks later, and some teacher who's behind on their grading does batch grading a week before the end of the semester, and we have 10 more assignments that weren't listed in the portal the day before.

Some of his teachers will take a late paper and give him a 50 on it. That's a huge advantage because coming from a 0 is hard.

And in before someone bitches at me that you can't not turn in work in real live, yeah, I know what's why we go to school and that's why we're working on it. Doctors, counselors, teachers, and parents.