Can't fail High School in DC

I have a lot of pros/cons that I would type out if i had the motivation to do so today. But, I don't, so I leave having only said this; If I had known in high school that I could wait until the last week of every semester to catch up and "learn" the curriculum without it effecting my grade, you can bet that the other 17 weeks of that semester would have entailed even more goofing off than they already did.



EDIT: INB4 Pariel


Edited by usafpilot07 - 16 November 2010 at 5:21pm

Grade inflation strikes again. 

“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.”

- Robert A. Heinlein

I have about a month left of student-teaching and am starting to feel some frustration myself. Since standardized testing is all the rage, I make my tests a royal pain in the arse on the multiple choice questions and put nothing on it from reading that they need to know from memory. Students do not take their own book notes, and all test material comes directly from assigned and checked notes from powerpoint or from worksheets I have assigned. I devote the class immediately before the test to a review game and give them a study guide that they can fill out during the review game. Many of the brighter students don't bother with the study-guide because they are so used to being pampered with easy tests they assume they will be fine. The rest of the students make the study guides into paper airplanes, fail, then complain that their student teacher is unqualified, or that their specific disability prevents them from doing well. Today's tests on the constitution were so horrible I am going to spend close to half my class tomorrow and some time throughout the rest of the week teaching them how to study, and chewing them a new one. College courses on teaching philosophy are next to useless, i'm preparing to give the students a taste of their own medicine, ditch the hippie crap and do drill and kill lessons instead of all the multi-media, multiple learning style crap. If they want to do the bare minimum, I'm more than capable of doing well enough on my graded teaching by half-assing my pedagogy and leaning on content. As long as they have their individualized special ed needs met, fine. I can make it so they must study regularly and read, or sit silently and do worksheets instead of class discussions, debate, group-projects, movies etc. I'll have the fun w/ my advanced classes who won't screw around. Asking for higher-level thinking from students about interpretations of the constitution is pointless if they don't know what the constitution is after a month of talking about it. I'd also be fine with forcing random drug-testing of any student who has below a 70% average in any class, and same-sex classrooms at this point. 

Complete horse crap.

Edited by Darur - 16 November 2010 at 9:34pm

This is as stupid as the using green ink thing because red hurts the child's feelings.

Thank you for this, I am about to write a paper for my comp class about drop out rates in schools and I am definitely going to use this.

Reb Cpl wrote: I always viewed a failing grade as a lesson in and of itself. You know, the old "Consequences for your actions" sort of thing. Tolgak, there's sort of a double talk in your post. Embarrass the kid with tough verbal questions- but not with a failing grade if he's genuinely not applying himself.

Edited by Tolgak - 17 November 2010 at 8:30am

51% is passing in Canada?  Even your grades are worth less*.

Edited by GroupB - 17 November 2010 at 12:07pm

The no-fail thing is one of those processes that I'm going to guess works in theory but is not really that applicable to real-world situations, at least not in the U.S.