Let's think about quality versus equality in terms of a classroom. Imagine for a moment a classroom in which the students received Cs no matter what they did. If they turned in brilliant essays they would get a C. If they turned in nothing they would get a C. This would create equality.
In a purely capitalist classroom there is no true fairness. Brilliant and talented writers can get As while barely doing any work while people who can't spell or who can't put ideas together easily (let's just say the student is not academically gifted rather than to use harsh words like to posit the notion of a dumbkopf or to use the now-banned word that begins with an r) might instead receive an F even if they work very hard. In addition, some students might come from homes in which ideas are discussed, and in which there are many books and there is more than enough food. One parent might be a writer and help their kids with beginnings and endings. Other students might come from homes in which the parent or parents are drug addicts and beat the children up for every nickle to go and buy more drugs while they lounge in front of the TV watching professional wrestling and getting each other in headlocks. They've sold the encyclopedia set for drugs and for more cheap grits. The kids don't have computers at home, and if they sit down to write, they are afraid their parents will beat them in an alcoholic rage while yelling something about how they are John Cena (professional wrestler), so the kids stay outside all night until the parent falls asleep in a drunken stupor and by the time they get home they are too tired to do their homework. Should the teacher yell at them for failure to do homework, and then hold them back a grade?
Another student with a tremendously gifted mind might have tutors and wonderful trips with the parents to museums. Her parents might help their kid with her homework between spooning caviar into her little golden face.
Should a teacher attempt to take this discrepancy into account? Should a teacher allot good grades only on the basis of quality of outcome, or should they try to equalize and redistribute grades according to the background of a student, and take into account what kinds of disadvantages they might face?
Should only quality matter, or should only equality matter? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of each system? Which one do you ultimately think is better for the society as a whole? Which one would you personally prefer as a teacher or as a student? Is there any way to blend the two? If so, which way would you lean, and to what precise percentage would you lean and why?
22 comments:
Kirby,
You do like to beat dead horses, but what the heck.
It seems pretty clear to me that the right answer to the question you ask depends a great deal on context, which includes the intended purpose of the grading system.
In the early grades, the principle purpose of the grading system is to instill good habits into the students, and effort-based grading makes a lot of sense. As a society, we want all of our members performing at the highest level they can. In particular, you want to instill the message that hard work will be rewarded, and slacking off will be punished. It is, e.g., a disservice to a bright young student to allow them to become lazy, because sooner or later they're going to find themselves in a more selective pool, and ill-equipped to compete against students who have similar abilities, but far more developed work ethics. Likewise, it can be a disservice to discourage a hard-working student early, because not all people develop mentally at the same rate. I'm willing to bet, for example, that more than a few of our peers were at or near the bottom of their 1st grade classes. I know I was. Time will cure most immaturity, but it's not so often successful in dealing with discouragement.
Later, in high school, in college, in graduate school, grades can be an important tool in deciding who has access to scant resources at the next level, and it is more important to assess performance. But even here, I think it is important not to simply pass along the brilliant but lazy because they are outperforming their peers. Lazy students will eventually flame out, to their disadvantage, and to the disadvantage of the program that eventually has to initiate that difficult conversation: you're not working hard enough, and we've given you chances for amendment that you've wasted, so this is good-bye.
I’ll also note a particular controversy that was active while I was in high school. Should the mandatory physical education classes be graded on performance or effort? The arguments were pretty clear on both sides, but the academics held the upper hand, so “attitude and effort” were the criterion used. How do you analyze this? Should the thin-chested geniuses have failed, because they couldn't do push-ups, or pull-ups, nor shoot a basket, nor hit a ball? Even if this prevented their graduation from High School, because the underlying course was mandatory?
Children who were too porky to move in the gymnasium need a certain amount of feedback to this effect. Students who are brain damaged and therefore are inert or largely inert or not in full control of their limbs or who need to use all their willpower just to move a toe are probably not to be considered on the same plane as students in full control of their bods who are just couch potato-esque.
Should the very young be given some money to stimulate their entreprenurial sense via paper routes, janitorial staffing, and the ability to mow the yard effectively and do the dishes and fold laundry?
This seems fine. Even kids who don't understand how to read right away should probably not be flattened. That makes sense. But they need some feedback, but it doesn't need to be that they suck, it might just be that they haven't mastered a given skill.
I was considered somewhat retarded in kindergarten. While all the other children were talking and chatting with one another and forming alliances I stood off to one side hating them all! I couldn't speak to anyone at all, and had no idea what there even was to say! Why should people attempt to communicate when all they did was build block houses when I wanted to paint my dreams, and draw pictures of bloody labyrinths in which creatures were caught in the engines of the food chain!
Somewhere around fourth grade I found it fine to talk with people. I was put into an accelerated class and we needed to set up chess pieces, and so on. Until then, I just didn't want to talk with anybody. I remember only once sitting next to a girl at lunch and thinking it was ok. Otherwise, I just wanted to be left totally alone in order to daydream and have monstrous daymares.
But then in first grade they passed around a reading test and I could read at tenth grade level. It was absurd. I couldn't communicate even to the level of a baby, but I could read whole chapter books. I think whatever was happening was way out of whack.
As a kid the ability to be cooperative was a good thing, and I think it was graded, as was the ability to get along in a group. I couldn't do either thing.
I've slowly learned to do these things. But down deep I think I am still some kind of dumb and deaf autistic guy off in hell and just barely touching in on the planet (thank goodness). Now that I'm over fifty life feels so good compared to the first forty years that never worked at all except within an academic mode in which I could write. I could barely communicate in any other way. But I am now able to function, but I annoy people all the time unless I think out very carefully what I am going to say and try to imagine the reactions.
People are often pygmies in one area and grotesque towering giants in another, and it fluctuates like a vast plain of billowing volcanoes coming and going. At any rate, I am now almost a model of politesse and diplomacy, as you can imagine, compared to what I was at four, when I rarely deemed it important to communicate with anyone but ghosts and strange beings with auras. Now, I always wave to the mailman, and tip the waitresses, too (although am usually a bit short in that respect, apparently).
Should there be some things that everybody should know upon graduating from high school? Should schools themselves be graded according to how well their students have achieved these universals.
Public school physical education is horseshit.
First it doesn't actually contribute to a child's ability to read or perform arithmetic. Folks keep trying to prove a link between the two and keep failing.
Second, it is geared towards a specific kind of athlete--specifically folks who are tall and fast or have great hand-eye coordination--volleyball and basketball and soccer and running--and, to a less-active extent, baseball all focus on these things--which I don't have a whole lot of (I'm neither tall nor terribly fast).
However, had the focus been on wrestling, football, or swimming, I'd have been a standout PE student.
But since the system is rigged towards a specific kind of athlete, I was destined to be a last choice, bored student who eventually became a senior just walking around the track waiting for my 50 minute prison sentence to end.
My dad was a PE prof at the local college so when it came to anything in PE I was always better than anyone else because my dad had taught it to me beforehand. I was coordinated physically but mostly because of endless experience throwing baseballs with him, hitting, playing soccer in the backyard for endless summer hours, swimming lessons from age three on, and so this also enabled me to appear normal before my peers which really helps a boy.
Quality in the phys. ed. dept. can help in the equality dept. As a boy, you get respect. As a boy, one of the best things you can have is a dad who teaches you how to play all the sports. Not only does it give you an advantage with the boys, but also with the girls. You end up starting on all the teams.
Quality is often a function of many people working together, whole families working together to build skills, to keep the weight off with bicycling and touch football and swimming and hiking, instead of lying around porking out on quiche like the communists.
Exercise is good for the brain.
This is very, very true - now, the exact kind of physical exercise, and how it's taught, well there's some discussion that can be had there.
But kids need to run around and do physical things -- The more, the better.
It enhances Neurogenesis. It Does make you smarter to exercise, and during the school day there should be time for free-play and time for structured-play.
It should be the same in our grownup lives.
That is all.
There was an article in Oprah about how solid exercise was the best prevention against Alzheimers. It was vague as to exactly how much was necessary per day. Ok, it didn't say anything about per diem requirements. Eight hours in your eighties would be tough to manage, but a half hour of hard exercise? A lot of my favorite writers continued to do hard exercise into the eighties and nineties. PG Wodehouse infamously had a giant chunk of India rubber that he used to work out with and made it to 94, writing a decent chapter of Sunset at Blandings on the morning of his final heart attack. Philippe Soupault lived to be 93, and continually walked for ten miles or more in PAris into his last decade. Pierre Klossowski lived long, but I don't know his exercise routine. I think he lived into his late nineties like his brother, Balthus. Ernst Junger lived into his 100s, and liked to ride horses, but I should think that was more exercise for the horse than for the rider.
GM,
Public school physical education is horseshit.
I respectfully disagree. I had required physical education at my public high school during my freshman and sophomore years. There is no question that there was some horseshit involved, but on the whole, the experience was beneficial.
First it doesn't actually contribute to a child's ability to read or perform arithmetic.
And this is a silly argument. There's more to education than reading and arithmetic, not that they are unimportant. Physical education has utility. The ideal of a strong mind and strong body do not represent mutually exclusive alternatives, but a whole vision. The purpose of public education is to create citizens—and this includes potential soldiers as well as potential statesmen.
Second, it is geared towards a specific kind of athlete...
And you don't think that mathematical education is geared to a specific kind of intellect? Or literary instruction?
If society is to be maximally productive, it is important that education be both deep and broad. There should be a certain amount of general education, of shared knowledge, so that we're not helpless in unexpected situations, and so that we can communicate with one another. At the same time, each individual will need to obtain specialized knowledge/training. We need welders and longshoremen and policemen as well as poets. Physical conditioning is highly relevant to some of these occupations.
However, had the focus been on wrestling, football, or swimming, I'd have been a standout PE student.
Well, now we're getting somewhere. In my PE classes, all three of these were covered along the way, together with baseball, basketball, tennis, volleyball, soccer, track, etc. The question I'd ask is the extent to which your criticisms of public education involve an overgeneralization of your personal experience.
I hate to put it this way, but maybe your school sucked.
The school might have been ok, but phys. ed instructors can definitely suck. Often there are specific teachers who suck. Our math and science teachers sucked at my high school. English was excellent. That could be aptitude. I loved sports and was terrific at all of them but still deeply disliked the phys. ed teachers. One of them was fired about five years ago for fondling a 13 year old's upper area.
Phys. ed people can be physically developed and yet completely absent in the mental and emotional department. Not all are, of course.
Academics can be overdeveloped intellectually and be underdeveloped int he physical and emotional area.
There are at least all three of those areas. Emotional life gets almost no education. People either get it from their parents or they don't. Most don't. So Lady Gaga fills in.
La la la ha ha ha.
Bad romance is what they ASPIRE to.
Stu:
Don't forget that you're 15-20 years older than me--things were far more nannyfied in the 80s and 90s.
But why on earth are we wasting time on PE when we have seniors who can't read?
Kids should run around on their own--lord knows I did, my friends and I went for hours-long hikes two or three times a week and played no-pads tackle football daily.
GM - The solution to illiteracy among seniors is NOT, and, I repeat, NOT to get rid of physical education.
Spending more time on a specific subject in a public school setting that is already failing is meaningless.
There were years in which I ran before school, had recess during the day, had basketball practice during the day, and had soccer practice after school.
And of course I can read!
Providing enriching, safe environments is what schools and communities and homes need to do. And for schools, phys. ed. should be a big, good part of that.
Have you ever taught kids of any kind GM? Give me a kid (especially a boy) who's struggling in school, and I would say have him run around in circles for 3 hours, and then work on reading for 1, and he is much more likely to improve than if he's forced to sit inside all day and try to read when his body is telling him I NEED TO RUN BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I WAS DESIGNED TO DO.
Putting a boy between the ages of 5 and 18 in school from 8 until 4 without providing for physical exercise is tantamount to torture.
Phys. Ed. needs to be BETTER, not banned. I had a shitty chemistry teacher (pretty much all my other teachers were great), but I wouldn't think the answer is : stop chemistry. It would be : improve the class.
GM,
Don't forget that you're 15-20 years older than me--things were far more nannyfied in the 80s and 90s.
Maybe. Remember that I have the experience of my children to draw on too, a daughter who went to a very good public high school in the early '00's, and a son who went to a very good parochial high school a couple of years later. I wouldn't characterize the experience of either as having been nanny-fied at all.
There is, and I think this is important, an issue of parental choice here. I chose to live where I live because the public school system was very highly regarded, and I was willing to live in a less fancy house and to pay more in taxes in order to provide my children with the advantage of excellent schools.
But why on earth are we wasting time on PE when we have seniors who can't read?
You're well into the regime of diminishing returns if you're dealing with seniors who can't read. A senior will have had 12 years x 180 class days per year x 6 instructional hours per class day, i.e., 12,960 hours of instruction at graduation. You're arguing over a couple of year long classes: 360 hours of instruction. Honestly, if 12,600 hours wasn't enough to teach someone how to read, another 360 hours of the same isn't going to make an appreciable difference. At that point, it probably is better to work on physical conditioning, because they're going to need it in the workplace.
It seems to me that you get at most what you pay for. If you live in a community that doesn't respect public teachers, and which is unwilling to pay competitive salaries for them, then you're going to get the teachers who couldn't find work in other districts, and very likely lousy public schools. The problem here isn't with notion of public education per se, it is with the values of the community in which you've chosen to live.
Kids should run around on their own--lord knows I did, my friends and I went for hours-long hikes two or three times a week and played no-pads tackle football daily.
This I agree with. Kids today are often overscheduled, or too distracted by XBoxes and the like, for the kind of self-directed games that we knew as kids.
Good. Get them the help out of my class and stop pretending they'll ever be college ready.
So let me get this straight. LSU has two quarterbacks, a black guy who rolls out and runs the option named Jefferson and a white guy, a drop back passer, named Lee, and neither one of them got the job done against Alabama in the national title game.
GM,
Good. Get them the help out of my class and stop pretending they'll ever be college ready.
Agreed. If seniors can't read, there's a big problem. It might be a learning disability, it might be with the student's motivation, it might be active undermining at home, and it be with chaos in the 1st and 2nd grade classrooms, but whatever, it's foolhardy to expect that classroom teachers at senior high (who may have 35 other students to deal with in their classes, and state and federal standards to meet for the class as a whole) are going to be able to carve out the kind of quality time for intervention that's necessary to deal with such a profound deficit.
If this is the problem, the solution is going to require 1-on-1 time with people who have the training, time, resources and aptitude to do late reading intervention. And it's going to require figure out what the stumbling blocks have been, and in removing and/or compensating for them. Anything less is just a way to set up both the student and the classroom teacher for failure, and pretending otherwise in the face of copious experience is maladministration.
As for the college ready part, I'd like to pick this out specifically, to agree with it. College education is correlated with higher income, and so it's become a national brain virus that we have to send kids to college, whether or not they have the aptitude, education, or interest, to give them a chance at economic prosperity. It should be clear, though, that a college education is neither necessary nor sufficient to these ends. It can help, but only for students who are able take advantage of it. Otherwise, it's just drinking and screwing camp, with a major financial obligation that falls due on graduation/expulsion. And there's a viable alternative to college in the practical trades, many of which are apprentice oriented, which might better fit the learning styles of these students.
Besides, as I'm sure you know, it's not your income that determines whether you'll prosper -- it's whether or not you're willing to live your life so that your means exceed your expenses. A tradesman who's making $20/hour and saving 20% is in practical terms a good deal richer and more prosperous than a lawyer who's making $250/hour, but whose expenses consume his means.
Craig,
So let me get this straight. LSU has two quarterbacks ... and neither one of them got the job done against Alabama in the national title game.
Nope, you've got it wrong. First off, race hasn't a damn thing to do with what happened at quarterback. Second, I don't believe that Lee (the drop-back passer) appeared in the game. Blaming him is asinine.
It seems to me that the guy who blew it was the LSU coach. As I understand it, he'd originally picked Jefferson (the more athletic, but less able passer) as his #1 quarterback. Jefferson got into some legal trouble (a bar fight, IIRC), and was suspended as a result. He was later exonerated (not all of the LSU players were), but the effect was that LSU played almost the entire season with what the coach thought of as his #2 QB, Lee.
Anyway, with the #1 guy eligible again, the LSU coach thought he'd pull a fast one by putting him back in without saying so, so that Alabama would spend its time preparing the defense for the "wrong" QB, and the wrong style of play. Anyway, the #1 guy looked like someone who hadn't seen a quality opponent in a long time. And the coach, either out of pride, or because he hadn't given the #2 guy any snaps in a month, wasn't willing to pull him.
I dare say he's not reading any of the Baton Rouge newspapers today, and there's a household ban on turning on the TV or radio, or answering the door or telephone.
Stu and I agree!
WC Fields has a routine in which he's explaining happiness to a small boy.
"Annual income 21 pounds, annual expenditures 22 pounds. Result: misery.
Annual income 21 pounds, annual expenditures 20 pounds. Result: happiness."
Lee played one series of downs late in the third quarter after Jefferson threw a shovel pass on third down that would have hit his running back in the back of his helmet if it hadn't been intercepted. Jefferson looked great tackling the linebacker to prevent a pick six, but should have tucked the ball under his arm and hoped for a block from his running back. Lee played the next series. He threw an incomplete pass, had a draw play stuffed for a three yard loss and then got sacked for a ten yard loss.
Alabama would likely have been equally effective against either quarterback simply because they controlled the line of scrimmage. Lee does well when he has time to set up and pick his target. Jefferson is a better improviser and was probably the best choice under the circumstances, but I think the game would have been more interesting if the coach had played them alternate series or alternate quarters.
The game wasn't nearly as close as the 21-0 score seemed to indicate. It could easily have been 42-0. I would have preferred to have seen Lee given more of a chance to come up with a big play to shift the momentum. LSU's defense did a remarkable job holding the Tide to nothing but field goals until halfway through the fourth quarter.
I also think the quarterback's names do say something about the LSU mindset. It's a symbology unique to Baton Rouge.
That's Dickens (from David Copperfield). W.C. Fields played the character in the 1930s.
Kirby,
Dickens, Micawber, not Fields. But yes, this is the classical model.
Thank you for locating it for me. Dickens, Micawber, Copperfield. I saw it as a young teen and it's guided my economics ever since.
Craig,
Lee played one series of downs late in the third quarter after Jefferson threw a shovel pass on third down that would have hit his running back in the back of his helmet if it hadn't been intercepted. ... He threw an incomplete pass, had a draw play stuffed for a three yard loss and then got sacked for a ten yard loss.
Thanks. I was half watching, and missed the substitution. When I checked the box score on ESPN, it didn't list any attempts for Lee, so I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Even so, hanging the loss in any way on Lee seems entirely unjustified.
The game wasn't nearly as close as the 21-0 score seemed to indicate. It could easily have been 42-0.
Or 28-3. But yeah, it wasn't close. The Tiger's played great red-zone defense, and their punter was crushing the ball, but these were just about the only phases of the game where they looked like a #1 team. Alabama looked like a #1 team in pretty much all phases.
I would have preferred to have seen Lee given more of a chance to come up with a big play to shift the momentum.
Yeah, me too. The classic definition of insanity—trying the same thing over and over again, and hoping for a different result—seems to apply.
I also think the quarterback's names do say something about the LSU mindset. It's a symbology unique to Baton Rouge.
You couldn't see this at Virginia?
On the other hand, it seemed to me that the worst decision that was made about the game was in letting Musburger announce it. He's got no insight whatsoever into the play of the game, and never has. His only interest is blowing with momentum, and talking about which players might go pro. He has no idea how to sell the game he's actually announcing, and adds no value. Honestly, I think Kirby'd have had more insight into the game.
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