quote: However, if the only way to keep your faith is to pretend no one ever thinks differently (or assign motives to them without ever asking), then I'd really rather not. Hermetically sealing your children is a great way to set them up for simply spectacular young adulthood adjustment traumas, when they do actually encounter the wide world.
Totally agree. I make a point not to exclude my child from things unless they are extremely objectionable.
Natalie attended a sex education class that described birth control and HIV. I absolutely believe in chastity until marriage and that is how I teach my daughter and what I hope she will believe as well. But when I got the slip home informing me about the class and asking me if I wanted to opt out I just discussed it with her and she went.
Had I forbidden it, she would have wondered what was so dangerous and evil about the class and she most likely would have heard everything from her friends anyway. By letting her go, but talking about it before and after with her, I had some teaching opportunity and showed her that I trusted her to learn about things and make her own decisions.
As it turned out it was wonderful, she came home and told me how at lunch the table she was sitting at was discussing the STD's they went over in the class and she said she told them that all she had to do was follow God's design for her life and save herself for marriage and she didn't need to ever worry about getting an STD or getting pregnant out of wedlock. I was so proud of her - by going and learning along with her classmates she was afforded a good opportunity to be a witness for her faith.
quote:Agreed, but who has the right to decide when to inform children of uncomfortable truths: parents or educators (speaking not only of teachers but school boards, superintendants, etc.). And how do you resolve conflicts? Should teachers always defer to parents? Vice versa? Arm wrestle and the winner gets their way?
Well the best way to solve this is to have a textbook committee made up of teachers and parents who look over the material and decide together what might be objectionable to some. Reading lists in literature class should be handed out at the beginning of the school year, so the parents have the opportunity to look it over and determine if anything on the list doesn't meet with their approval. The teacher should understand and be accomodating with providing alternative reading material or alternative assignments for the child.
No child should be forced to read something he or she objects to. If the child doesn't object but the parent does, then what I would like to see is the parent call and talk to the teacher and ask what educational value the book has, why the teacher thinks it's necessary, and what suitable alternatives might be available. Perhaps the teacher and parent can reach an agreement. If they can't, and they still strongly disagree, then no arm-wrestling is necessary, I think the teacher should defer to the child's parent.
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I am a teacher in the US, so that means I'm in school five days a week. Now that we have that cleared up, can you explain what you mean?
Krank
What state?
Go into the archives of OSC reviews everything. One of them is about homework.
I've been in a drama class where the teacher gave us an assignment solely because she needed a grade. No other reason. Just had to have something on that report card outside of participation.
Ever wonder why SAT scores are so high? Probably because they've made the test easier. Why? Because students were scoring poorly. So instead of teacher our students better, we made the test easier. And colleges just make their SAT requirements higher anyway. It's like that for every standarized test. Grading on a curve? What the hell is that?
No child left behind? Why not? Some of them need to be.
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The SAT has been consistently made harder with each revision, and scores each year are normalized so a given score indicates a given level of performance in the first year of college, even looked at across years. The SAT has subjects on it nowadays that weren't covered when it first came out, because they were considered too hard.
Similarly to how until relatively recently (past few decades) there were almost no high schools teaching calculus, but now almost any decent sized school can have one or more full first year calc classes and often a second year calc class, with the numbers consistently increasing. Other high level subjects are seeing consistent gains (when funding hasn't been cut) as well.
The scores are going up because those populations introduced to the SATs relatively recently are becoming better at taking them, slowly reversing the huge dip that occurred when large numbers of low income students and students with disabilities became encouraged to take the SAT.
Grading on a curve, a true curve, and one sensitive to the test's goals and score distribution, is an excellent way to properly score a test. And of course, most standardized tests don't pay much attention at all to raw scores, only to percentiles, which can't really be curved, so I have no idea why you seem to associate grading on a curve with standardized tests.
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Uh, back to what Belle said: I thought that was very well put. I wish I had known at the time that I could have asked for another assignment instead of reading Catcher in the Rye in HS. (I know, how shocking, it's a classic, etc. etc.) But all I got out of it was a head full of foul language that popped out every time I stubbed my toe.
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Yea, Belle, I hope I can be as wonderful a mom as you are someday in the very far future when I have children.
Jenna- In my senior year we read Heart of Darkness in class which I hated but read because it wasn't actually bothering me, I just didn't like it. I drew the line at watching Apocalyse Now! in class, though. I informed my teacher that she could find an alternative assignment for me to do. And wrote a paper or something in the library on the days we watched it in class. I've never had a huge problem standing up for myself. It sucks that too many people don't realize they can.
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The SAT test was only changed recently, and wasn't changed for 10 years before that.
And the average score on the SATs was a lot lower before that. And it's not because they weren't as smart, either.
Yes, more advanced classes are being offered, but most students don't take them.
My grading on a curve comment wasn't really about standarized tests (which HAVE been getting easier) and I still don't see how being administered in any way is reasonable. I get 20% of the test wrong, I should get an 80.
Also, the whole idea that C is average is wrong. If the average goes down, why should some D students suddenly become C students? They didn't do anything to deserve that upgrade. And then the A students can't really get more Aish than they are. Where's their boost? An extra +?
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A true curve is standarized so that the majority of scores are in the middle ("C"s) with a few on either end. It looks like a normal curve, if you know what that is. It's the most accurate way to show scores, by showing how one person did in relation to their peers. It doesn't make sense, if everyone got, say, below a 50% to just fail everyone, since obviously in a case such as that either the test is too hard or the teacher isn't doing a very good job. Instead you standardize the scores so that everyone is scored according to how they did in relation to their peers. I go to Purdue, and it's not uncommon for the average on engineering exams to be around 30%, that doesn't mean that everyone should just flunk the class, it usually means that that's the average the prof was going for for some reason, and then he standardizes it so the scores come out right.
What a lot of high school teachers call a curve isn't a curve at all, they just bump the highest score to a hundred and move everyone else's score up by the same amount. So if the highest score is 90%, then everyone's score gets bumped 10%. That's not a true curve, and it doesn't actually make much sense to use, except to inflate grades. I assume it's what you're used to, though.
I hope this makes sense, I understand it intuitively, but I've never had to explain it before.
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Archer, the SAT changes every year, in the sense that the questions are different. The difficulty of the individual questions is closely monitored, and various mixes are used in order to obtain accurate ideas about student capabilities. The SAT has been getting harder pretty much consistently, and students have been doing better.
The SAT underwent a renormalization which increased scores at one point, but what the score is doesn't matter, its what the score is supposed to indicate, and how successfully it does that. What the score is supposed to indicate didn't change, and how successfully it does that increased with the renormalization. Students still did better in real terms across the gap, which can be told because the differences in scoring are known.
And of course, its also possible to curve to other curves than the normal distribution, and to curve to normals that aren't centered on a C. The point on tests isn't to just count you off based on how many you got wrong, its to result in a score that properly indicates your understanding of the subject in a way appropriate to the class, which is an admixture of absolute and relative performance.
If I miss half the questions on a test, but the test was written so that those who get at least the questions I got right have demonstrated a high level of understanding in the subject, I should get a B or an A, not fail.
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Good explanation of curving, blacwolve, and of the problems with the incorrect way many teachers curve, but . . .
quote:. . . since obviously in a case such as that either the test is too hard or the teacher isn't doing a very good job.
whoa whoa whoa WHOA. You have provided two very reasonable hypotheses to explain the situation, but it is by no means obvious that either of these is the case. Very often, in fact, neither of these is.
From my experience, I can tell you that sometimes the material has been well-taught, the test was fair, and the students en masse did not perform at the level they needed to.
I can understand why that may seem farfetched. There is one teacher, and likely one test, and there are dozens of students. It seems more reasonable to suppose the blame lies in the one than in the many.
But here's an example of when it may: students learn, from years of improperly done curves by unknowledgeable teachers, that if they all do poorly, the teacher will simply reteach and throw out the quizzes, replacing them with easier quizzes, or will curve the quizzes so that their low grades become respectable. Sometimes you get a situation where kids believe there is no incentive or need for them to make an effort. To break the cycle, they need to have a quiz or test where everyone bombs and the teacher says, "Gee, I'm sorry you all did not try harder. Perhaps for the next test you will." Next time, they know that the teacher is serious, and they do better.
When I have a classful of bad tests or quizzes, which happens on occasion--or more frequently, one question that is missed by a large number of students--I consider very seriously the possibility that the question was unfair or that I did an inadequate job. But sometimes, I know in my heart that this was not the case, but simply a situation where a large number of students did not truly care enough to prepare adequately. And, in those cases, I do not enable the students.
(I have seen "education" books--no such thing, imo--suggest the view you just proposed, and instruct preservice teachers to throw out any item missed by a large fraction of the students. Poppycock. It's garbage like this that weakens our education and inflates our grades.)
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Oh goodness, that wasn't what I meant at all. What I really meant wasn't really obvious in what I actually said though, so I completely understand you being upset.
I think in the lower grades, up through about 10th grade, tests shouldn't be curved at all, teachers should just look at them and determine what the class needs to work on and what level they're at and adjust classwork and future tests accordingly, as far as I'm aware that's generally what happens.
When you get to upperclassmen in high school and college though, there are times when a teacher is teaching material and may not know exactly what level of student he or she is teaching it to and may discover after giving a test that the class in general is at a lower level than he or she assumed and adjust the grades and their teaching in the future accordingly. I'm not sure how my mind parsed that as not being a very good teacher, and I do completely apologize, because it is in fact one of the hallmarks of a good teacher. Most of the bad teachers I've had wouldn't care enough to bother curving a grade.
Sceondly, I go to Purdue and all of my friends are in engineering. A lot of the time they'll be given tests where it's just impossible to obtain a hundred percent. The tests are written in such a way that there is three hours of work with a calculator, administered in one hour without one. In those cases for whatever reason the professors have decided that they are willing to trade an average of around a 30% for whatever benefit they get from making the test too hard. They then curve the test so that they don't fail all of the students. So basically, there are times when the teacher's goal is a very low average percentage, and in those cases not curving the grades is the option that doesn't make sense.
I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to insult you or any other teachers. I would go back and edit, but then this whole exchange wouldn't make much sense.
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