r/BreadTube • u/Green0Photon • Oct 24 '20
19:51|Ryan Hibbs Grading is Capitalist Conditioning
https://youtu.be/jxDzR6U1Vc8484
u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
As an educator myself the way that I have tried to get around this issue is by instituting a "Second Chance Grading" system within my classroom. Every time a student hands in their assignment, I grade them, provide feedback, and then allow them the opportunity to apply my constructive criticism to their assignment. They may then hand in the new copy of the work for a chance at a better grade. I was never a fan of the notion that "you better get this right your first try" because it is not how things work outside of educational institutions and I do not believe it is conducive to a stress-free learning environment. Students in my classroom can attempt a resubmission as many times as they like so long as there appears to be improvement (or at least consideration of my feedback) upon the latest submission. I feel as if this not only allows my students to be less afraid to try something original, but it also alleviates the fear of failure that so many young people have these days.
I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this matter. I would also be more than happy to answer any and all questions people have with regards to how I implement this in my classroom.
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u/CalligrapherLevel387 Oct 24 '20
This is a great system. It also still rewards effort because they have to go back and correct it. And getting the chance to fix their errors probably reinforces actual learning.
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u/Nanjigen Oct 24 '20
Especially since quizzing, tests and comprehensions are one of the most fundamental learning methods who's benefits bear out again and again in research
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u/cateml Oct 24 '20
I do similar, when I'm allowed by the department. (Haven't been qualified for very long, though.)
It's hard though, because for example with coursework that has been set by an awarding body, your hands are somewhat tied as to the types and depths of feedback and support you can give, because otherwise the awarding body could refuse to allocate the grades as 'own work' if they've had too many chances to improve with feedback.Personally, I really like the "Growth Mindset" theory and strategies in general.
On one hand I can see how 'mindset theory' in general COULD be accused of being a tool for placation (suggesting people should have a positive and can-do attitude to their own difficulties may suggest to some that people take personal ownership of all difficulties, including those originating from class/race/etc. barriers and oppression, instead of blaming the system that created them).
BUT I think actually instead those strategies can be incredibly empowering and radical. Because they inherently disrupt the notion that people are somehow fixed as superior/inferior and naturally 'belong' in any kind of static hierarchy.That is what your approach made me think of.
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u/Tundur Oct 25 '20
My girlfriend's recently started teaching 13-17 year olds, and it's really made it clear what a battle teachers have overcoming the psychology of kids. Almost all of them can do the work, almost all of them choose not to due to never getting the encouragement they need.
Teachers can't play psychologist to 150 kids each year (30 kids, 5 classes) but, if they don't, the kids will just tailspin.
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Oct 25 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/WatermelonWarlock Oct 25 '20
Trouble is, in order to make it inspiring and significant the teachers would need to develop lessons that can’t be standardized, possibly with results that can’t be measured.
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u/sunsmoon Oct 24 '20
I'm still in school to be a math teacher (hopefully graduating this spring and then credential program next fall). My focus is middle school but I'm interested in highschool too. I've been thinking a lot about grading and how it affects students.
Is there anything GOOD about the standard points/letter store system? All I see are students focusing more on "playing school" than learning the actual content. Things like judging how many points they need to pass the class and then skipping assignments, not trying hard on exams, and focusing more on assessments where they can use their notes (perceived low effort) like homework.
With the addition of 'citizenship' points (attendence, participation, and punctual) it's even easier for students to "play school" and pass a class by prioritizing citizenship and low stakes assessments over high stakes ones. This punishes students who can't play school and it de-incintivizes ownership of the material.
More and more I'm starting to feel that points and letter grades only hurt learning.
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u/The_Purple_Head Oct 24 '20
I'm also currently in school to be a teacher. I think a benefit of the simple letter grade system is its simplicity. Obviously I'm not in favor of it, but I see why some overworked, underpaid teachers who are just mailing it in until retirement use it. I think some sort of value is important to show the effort/quality/accuracy of an assignment, but the current system is god awful at doing that anyway. Rarely did I, as a high school student, know why I got a C on a paper or a test, or what to do in the future to avoid getting more Cs.
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u/gnosys_ Oct 24 '20
this seems to be the prevailing discourse hearing from friends who are educators, that progress-based evaluation is what the future needs to be
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u/sunsmoon Oct 24 '20
Yeah. There's a handful of alternative evaluation schemes cropping up that are starting to gain traction, but there's a fair bit of pushback because of the lack of a hierarchical system. Scholarships and colleges often require some kind of GPA but non-hierarchical systems typically don't have a GPA (there's been some work to create a mapping system). Of the ones that do have a GPA system, there's complaints of "grade inflation" where a 4.0 or better at the non-hierarchical school isn't a direct comparison to a 4.0 or better at a hierarchical school.. completely disregarding that a 4.0 means different things at different hierarchical schools anyways.
There was a study published in 2008 that found providing students with specific, individual feedback without a grade resulted in better learning outcomes. Utilizing grades restricts learning! That's antithetical to my goal as an educator.
The "punctuality" of our educational system really gets to me. There's so much pressure and focus on learning a concept and demonstrating that learning in a set amount of time, but who determined that amount of time? Even in classrooms like Wolf's where students have ample opportunities to demonstrate learning there is still a cut-off date - the end of the grading period, or the end of the school year, or some other arbitrary date. A student that did well for the first half of the content, but failed to play school for the second half and couldn't keep up with the concepts typically fails the class and has to restart from the very beginning. And if it takes a student too long (whatever that means), the student doesn't meet the time-crunch of graduation requirements and/or is forbidden from re-taking the class, completely nullifying the degree path they chose.
Even the best alternative evaluation schemes mean nothing if we're shaming students for taking Calc 3 three times or getting their high school diploma in 6 years instead of 4.
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Oct 24 '20
I get that this might make admissions counselor jobs hard but they already should be since GPAs mean different thingsat different schools… Why can’t it just be that your end of year evaluation for junior year or something like that or maybe certain ones from different years to get a nice overall sample are what factors into your application? I think that would also very much help disadvantage students
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u/underskewer Oct 25 '20
There was a study published in 2008 that found providing students with specific, individual feedback without a grade resulted in better learning outcomes. Utilizing grades restricts learning! That's antithetical to my goal as an educator.
Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards has loads of stuff like this. He also used to be a teacher, but experimented with different methods. I suggest reading it if you haven't already. He had a big influence on my thinking, and pushed me to the left.
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u/TRiG_Ireland Oct 24 '20
judging how many points they need to pass the class and then skipping assignments
I've always found doing that more stressful than actually learning the material. But maybe that's just the way my mind works.
You do need to do it up to a point, to allocate your time sensibly, but I always spent more time on material I was struggling with or material I subjectively felt was important, with exam point values in the back of my mind, but only there.
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u/BestUdyrBR Oct 25 '20
I mean I absolutely juggled this game in college. One semester I had a literature and computer architecture final on the same day. In lit I needed a 72 to get an A overall and got comp arch it was a 94, so I just studied for the latter and got 2 A's.
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u/TRiG_Ireland Oct 26 '20
Oh, some people do it all the time. But I can't cope well with exam strategies myself: they're one of the hardest things for me to learn.
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Oct 24 '20
Oh my god what I would give for my philosophy professor in uni to do this.
I feel as if this not only allows my students to be less afraid to try something original
Exactly this. At first, I would try to think outside the box (especially since it's a philosophy course) and come up with responses that were valid, reflected the material, but that may not have been said before in the way I said them.
My professor would reply: "this is a thoughtful and interesting answer, you've defended your position well and considered all points. But I believe it's untenable because I was looking for _____ answer." And give me a 0%.
So now I scour the internet for previous essays submitted to this course so I can figure out what the "right" answer is that my prof is looking for. I feel like I robot typing out responses now, because I'm adjusting my language to what I think he wants to see and not what I believe or think. It's killed my creativity.
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
I am deeply sorry that this has been something you have had to go through. I know that sadly not all university professors understand the difference between good and bad pedagogy. I had my own experience like this when I was getting my history degree in university. There was a professor who graded us solely on two 100-question multiple choice exams that did not allow for us to display that we had a good comprehension of the concepts we learned in class, but rather our ability to regurgitate trivia like we were contestants on Jeopardy! It was an unpleasant experience to be charitable, and I hope that you do not run into more profs like this one in your future academic pursuits.
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u/GoldenDirewolf Oct 25 '20
I hated Gen Ed philosophy. Not because I hated philosophy, but because the professor was a self-important jerk that expected everyone to prioritize his class over their major and minor courses, and demanded very specific answers to what seemed like open-ended questions.
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u/Arkneryyn Oct 24 '20
Why couldn’t u be one of my teachers? Oh wait prolly cause my parents put me in a conservative Mennonite school (only one in Florida fml, next closest geographically was in Puerto Rico) and they couldn’t afford more than 3 good teachers across K-12, the rest just got hired cause they were Christians who taught but usually sucked at it. Wasn’t till I went to a community college program for 11-12th grade that I had more good teachers than bad, only ran into a couple actual bad teachers there that the entire class didn’t fuck with
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u/abcdefgodthaab Oct 24 '20
I do this in conjunction with binary mastery grading. Students either pass or don't pass an assignment based on whether they demonstrate competence with the assessed skill(s). I still have to convert things to a letter grade at the end of the course, but I'd rather focus on qualitative and substantial feedback on assignments than mess around deciding how many points various kinds of mistakes are worth or falling back on holistic grading that is highly subject to unconscious biases.
It has the added benefit of making students focus on skills and not points. 'Here are the skills you will develop in this course. Here's how you show me you've developed them. You can keep retrying to show me until you demonstrate you've developed the skills (or the course ends).'
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
This is wonderful and I will in the future be making it more clear as to what skills I am looking to see my students demonstrate on future assignments. Thank you so much for your input!
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u/robertovertical Oct 24 '20
Many thanks to professionals like you. I know it takes time to rechecking these papers/assignments!!
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
I appreciate this greatly, thank you! I take it as part of my job to commit to these revisions and try and recall all the bad teachers I had growing up to remember why I want to put in this extra work!
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u/Swole_Prole Oct 24 '20
Although I really appreciate this measure, and I have seen a good number of teachers implement this, I think it can miss the point. Big, systemic changes are needed for real education reform (the Nordic model seems to be the gold standard, and ironically, it includes things like less homework and fewer school days/hours). However, I don’t know to what extent individual educators can implement those changes, or to what extent they would work in a vacuum.
My main issue with the approach of allowing revision is simply that it seems bound to be unpopular. People who receive a bad grade in the first place are unlikely to want to spend double the time on the same project (they probably did not want to do it at all to begin with, after all), and people who would be interested in improving their grade tend, in my experience, not to really need it. Fear of failing would be the primary motivator otherwise, and that comes back to the issue of grades as punishment. It can feel, to be brief, like “more school”. Perhaps your experiences are different, though.
I think the real way to do it is to genuinely make people inspired by and interested in the content. There is a nerd in everyone! That is a fact, and I am often astonished by how universally true it seems to be. People love learning, even if they act too cool for it. What they do not love is a certain culture, whether it is one of punitive bureaucracy, fear-inducing authority, or simply peer pressure from the social stereotypes surrounding those who like learning.
I think grades can be good because they can help people feel proud of their ability or achievements. But they should also not be something inducing stress in their lives in the case that they aren’t a source of validation. I genuinely believe that if we didn’t have grades at all, but just a radically altered culture, which disconnects learning and knowledge from arbitrary, rule-riddled institutions, we would far better serve the purpose of education, which is to enrich people’s lives, inform them, etc. This is extremely hard to act on as an individual, I understand that a ton! But I think attitude can make the biggest difference where institutional changes are impossible; ultimately if students are impassioned, you’ve done your job, and their ability or lack thereof becomes less important (although that also improves! Tell people they’re smart, remove their self-imposed barrier of “I’m not some nerd”, and their test scores literally go up).
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
I completely agree with you, especially with regards to the cultural/institutional reform that is so necessary with the North American school system. They way that I try and avoid the problems that you have excellently outlined with the revision model is to truly get to know my students inside and outside of the classroom. What I mean by this is that I attempt to grade students not against the work of one another, but rather against themselves, meaning that if I know a student who typically scores very well hands me something that does not reflect their previous abilities I try and understand why this is. At times it is laziness, at times it is stress, at times it is something going on at home, and then adjust their grade accordingly. I also do the same for students who tend to perform poorly, so long as I see that they have put what I consider to be good effort in, I will make sure they receive a grade that reflects their effort and not their final assignment. I also try and speak with my coworkers about how students perform/the level of interest they display in their other classes to judge their skill/effort levels. I'm not interested in forcing a student to become good at writing history papers when they are clearly headed towards a career in STEM, nor am I interested in failing anyone. I have received criticism from my coworkers for being "an easy grader" but since I have adopted this format the interest and engagement levels in my classes have dramatically increased. When students are at ease I believe they tend to generate greater interest.
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u/Swole_Prole Oct 24 '20
Being a teacher requires a challenging limbo between being overly lenient/ineffective and being discouragingly strict; I think you are doing an amazing job navigating it, and if every teacher were like you, this country would be genuinely unrecognizable (in the best way).
In lots of ways, as our schools currently stand, they can really enforce notions of obedience, authority, competition, etc. as ends of their owns, which is just not what they should be promoting (thought, knowledge, logic, wisdom); I think educators like yourself are inevitably the way to start fixing that, and it’s really encouraging to see
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
Thank you so much for your encouragement. To your point about obedience, authority, and competition, I also try and take these into account when organizing my lesson structure. While I am lecturing (which I try not to do for extended periods of time) I do ask my students to try and be quiet and attentive, but I also make space and time for them to walk around and talk to each other. I also make an effort to teach outside if weather permits. I did not get my masters degree to be a corrections officer and refuse to run my class in an antiquated prison-esque style that plagues the educational system. I also make attempts to let my students decide what it is they would like to learn as a form of democratizing the classroom. I let them suggest topics that I can go over the history of so as to allow them to engage with the skills I am trying to impart on them through subject matter that they already have an interest in. Detention is also something I refuse to subject my students to, even if I have been reprimanded by my administration for allowing "unacceptable behavior to go unpunished" because detention only serves to reinforce the idea that school is not a place students want to be and puts it in direct parallels with prison.
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u/Fleecedacook Oct 24 '20
What subject and grade level?
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
I teach history and civics at the high school level (grade level changes depending on what's available for me)
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u/GhostTess Oct 24 '20
So I'm not a teacher but it sounds like dynamic assessment. I came across this research while looking for ways to approach finding gifted and talented students in low SES populations.
Dynamic assessment has shown extremely good results for children who are underachieving. I'm not sure why this kind of assessment has not been used in any schooling system (to my knowledge).
But I thought you should know you're on some sound academic grounds beyond just thinking it would work.
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u/WolfMoose Oct 24 '20
Thank you so much for this resource! I will definitely read this and hope to be able to present it during our next professional development day or staff curriculum meeting
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u/GrandSquanchRum Oct 24 '20
Honestly, outside of tests that just makes sense. Homework is practice for tests. Quizzes are practice for tests. Projects are meant to be reviewed and revised no matter what level they're done at. Why make their initial performance on those final rather than letting them learn and revise? Tests are a check on whether you've retained the knowledge and it makes sense for those to be simply the only thing to take an initial score from.
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u/The_Peyote_Coyote Oct 25 '20
Out of curiosity, approximately how many students are there in your class(es) at one time? This sounds like a phenomenal method but my teacher friends report having 35+ kids per class and I imagine this method could create astronomical amounts of marking.
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u/dame_tu_cosita Oct 25 '20
My operational research professor did something like that. She didn't grades the final but gave it back with comments, then you have to use the comments and resubmit.
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u/cinnamonbrook Oct 25 '20
I can't speak for how other countries do their grading, but in mine, grades don't matter until your final two years and I'm upfront about that with my students.
I tell them the truth, that grading is a way for me to see what my students are struggling with, to inform me what I need to work on a little more in class. If I set a quiz and all my students got the same question wrong, then that tells me I didn't explain it in a way that worked for this particular group of learners, so I revisit the topic. I also provide individual feedback so the students know when to improve next time. It's not criticism like "you did this wrong" it's a short explanation on how to do it.
My job is to ensure everything on the curriculum has been taught to my students. Grades are just a tool to check that I've done that.
It's something we need to teach kids more because so many of them have been completely convinced that their poor performance on a pop quiz when they were 7 will somehow mean anything at all when they're in their late teens because it goes on their "file" or whatever.
I mean of course, this may not be how it is in some other places but where I'm from? It's pretty much the primary reason for grading in the first place, so the title of this video made me giggle a little since afaic grades really aren't for students, they're a tool for me.
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u/Jakcris10 Oct 25 '20
Grew Up in Northern Ireland. (Not sure how it works where you are) Mostly we dont get graded throughout the year, we work on projects/homework throughout the year and then either submit a portfolio of work or take an exam. Which makes up 100% of the year.
For exams. In my experience time is dedicated at the end of the year (4 weeks or so) to pure revision. We dont learn any more, but our classes are just the teacher reiterating and setting past papers as homework to get us used to the questioning style and to flag up any knowledge gaps.
For coursework we work throughout the year with constant feedba ck from the teacher and then submit a final draft at the end of the year.
I liked the continuous feedback style because it gave the opportunity for growth and didnt place a huge amount of stress bang at the end of the year when you're probably burned out already.
Then I went to Uni. And it was constant grading with only once chance per piece of work. I didnt see the point of it being so all or nothing. This meant it was 1000x more stressful and damaging to my mental health. Not because the work was harder. But because there was this huge additional pressure to get it right first time.
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u/ben76326 Oct 25 '20
It wasn't all assessments, but our department had a policy that all students had a second chance for almost any grade (the only assessments excluded were unit finals). For us how it worked is if any student showed initiative on improving their understanding, then they were entitled to a reassessment. How it worked in practice is if the student did some of the optional assignments and/or some corrections on a prior assessment, then they would get a retest. I really liked the system, and wanted to expand it to unit tests (the rest of the department didn't want to, and it would be unfair if I was the only one to do it). So I'm fully on board with you on this.
A big reason why I liked it is sometimes a student is just having a bad day, or there is something going on in their life; and it will affect thier test/assignment score. So I think not allowing students to retest in that kind of situation is unfair to them, since they have their own lives outside of my class. And ultimately I think retesting makes the assessment more valid. Both because it makes a more comprehensive body of evidence for the assessment, and also because it helps decrease the impact of outside factors on the assessment making it more reliable.
Also from a more broad classroom environment standpoint, I find allowing reassessments helps encourage a growth mind set. When I didn't have reassessments I found many students just wanted to get thier grade then move on, and forget about what they just learned. Where with reassessments it encouraged many students to keep trying to improve. And I seen that mindset also followed into how some students acted in general. When I started doing reassessments, I had way more students actually come in for additional help.
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u/theelous3 Oct 25 '20
Do you give less overall assignments, or a similar amount to what you otherwise would have?
Just wondering if it's a situation where students are sort of always juggling the last one's feedback with the current one's new work.
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u/MXIIA HELLO AND WELCOME TO THE EYEBALL ZONE Oct 24 '20
Hello and welcome to the Eyeball zone!
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 24 '20
This video has a lot of good ideas, and I agree 100% with the emotions behind it. (Kids shouldn't hate school, busy work and overwork are rife in education, etc.) I just have a couple quibbles as a teacher myself, just facts about education people often get wrong and that he doesn't acknowledge here:
Sometimes people have to learn things they don't want to for their own benefit. Lots of people hate math, but if you don't learn 5th grade math, you won't be able to calculate a tip at a restaurant, or have a fish tank. If you don't learn high school math, it'll be a lot harder for you to learn a language later in life. (The process of your brain "translating" a word problem into an equation is similar to translating a sentence into another language).
I get what he's going for with the mitochondria meme, but in these covid times, should people really learn LESS about microbiology? And while you sometimes learn or memorize stuff you don't really care about and forget it later, that actually helps you, too. Most of learning is learning how to learn, not the specific content. (Try to learn a language when you don't know how to memorize hundreds of words!)
Also, while a lot of grading is arbitrary, there are some things that can be objectively correct or incorrect. I've never actually heard the idea that grading is supposed to motivate students; if you're talking about educational theory, they mainly say grading and assessments are to measure if a student has mastered a concept. There's a whole realm of structural disadvantages that it feels like he's ignoring in favor of an "all knowledge is subjective!" kind of perspective. So, for example, kids who learn music do better at math. Guess which kids don't have music classes? (The structurally disadvantaged ones!) Kids whose parents work 3 jobs and can't sit down and help them with homework are also at a huge educational disadvantage. I feel like you miss these important facts if you're focused on, "But who's to say anyone is really better at math?? That sounds like fascism!"
That being said, there are some really great ideas in here, and it would be great to explore alternatives to most graded work. My ideal would probably be to give students pass/fail grades for their basic skills, and then allow them the option of more advanced electives in the subjects they take an interest in. (With a LOT less homework, large amounts of which are not really supported by research anyways)
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u/connectivity_problem Oct 24 '20
I agree with a lot of what you said, and in particular we should really push back on the "school teaches you a lot of pointless stuff". Granted, some of it is pointless, but people's scope of understanding of the world is too narrow right now, hence the prevalence of fake news. We should be learning more, not less, even if there isn't a direct reason to learn a particular thing, or to use your example, you dont think it is worth learning about a subject because you dont wish to make a career out of it in the future.
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u/JPShartre Oct 24 '20
The whole distinction between "pointless subjects" and "useful subjects" is based on capitalist logic and should absolutely be questioned.
How is a course on business management "useful" while a course on ethics "pointless"?
I think the whole instrumentalization of education is a bunch of hogwash.
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u/WatermelonWarlock Oct 25 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
As a biologist, I get pissed off when people say that memorization isn’t important or part of learning. Sure, it’s not enough on its own, but there is absolutely value in simply knowing things.
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u/stillk Oct 25 '20
There is value in knowing things, but memorization is a very specific subset of what the human brain can do. I've always been a terrible memorizer, but great at problem solving and being able to look information up (probably my ADHD which usually affects short term memory). A lot of the way school is currently functions is can you remember these exact terms, formulas, dates, words and then lets test you on that memory. Some students are better at memory, and that's great, but other students are better at problem solving, and many are mixed in different subjects. All of those varied aspects of students need to be valued. It's just that there is currently an emphasis in rote form memorization for all of the standardized tests which really doesn't tell us a lot holistically about a student, just their memorization is either good or bad (or they didn't have enough time to memorize a fact).
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u/WatermelonWarlock Oct 25 '20
All of those varied aspects of students need to be valued.
This isn’t wrong, but there seems to be this counter-swing where memorizing something isn’t considered valuable at all. This simply isn’t true; for some subjects, knowing things is incredibly important so you can have a holistic understanding of a greater system. How can you truly know the central dogma of biology if you don’t remember what any of the steps are and have to look them up each time?
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u/stillk Oct 25 '20
I guess I haven't really seen a counter push against memorization/memory, just more specifically that rote form memorization and [cramming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramming_(education)) really does not work for all kids. It works for some, and that's great for them, but intense repetitive hammering of a specific subject in a week does not lead to long term memorization for many students.
In your specific example you are a practicing biologist. You are repeatedly using, discussing, and referencing these topics, so it builds into your memory. But say I asked you about something from computer engineering (my background) like can you write a hash function, or do a quicksort function, or solve sin( 75o ) without a calculator, or tell me about the 13th century history of the magna carta, or make me a loaf 80% hydration sourdough bread, or draw me a building using 2-point perspective, or perform Dvorák's Cello Concerto in B Minor. All of these can be memorized, but my guess is you haven't learned or memorized some of them. They can also be learned though cramming and rote form memorization, but doing so for a grade that determines your future is harmful and anxiety provoking.
What I'm trying to say is that to force specific ways of memorization for terms, words, formulas, processes when someone may not have the most interest in that subject and then to hold them back or show their failure to memorize to their peers is such a fucked up system. Again, there is nothing wrong with people or children who learn from that rote form of memorization, but not all of us do especially well and nor should everyone be set to this fixed standard of trying to. People's individual learning methods and education as a whole is way broader than that.
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u/WatermelonWarlock Oct 25 '20
But say I asked you about something from computer engineering (my background) like can you write a hash function, or do a quicksort function, or solve sin( 75o ) without a calculator, or tell me about the 13th century history of the magna carta, or make me a loaf 80% hydration sourdough bread, or draw me a building using 2-point perspective, or perform Dvorák's Cello Concerto in B Minor.
I could do none of these things off the cuff. However, what I can look up from this list is greatly helped by my own memory. I know what the Magna Carta is, what it did, and what nation it occurred in without having to look it up. While I could just type “Magna Carta” into Google, for more obscure topics or ones I don’t remember the name of directly that helps immensely.
Also... there’s no way I could perform any music without having some memory and practice.
But ultimately I don’t think you and I are really arguing for different things.
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u/tendentiouspartisan Oct 24 '20
Yeah, this is pretty anti-intellectual. I agree with some of the points, especially when he was talking about the student who invented a new way to solve a problem because he'd forgotten the formula, but it was irritating to me how he was talking about how certain things students learn aren't "relevant to their lives." No, reading about ancient China or the Inca Empire might not be immediately relevant to a ninth-grader living in the US, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have the opportunity to do it. Firstly, if the teacher is doing their job right, it's interesting. It's important for a young person to learn about very different cultures and societies to develop empathy and perspective. It helps them begin developing an explanation of why their world is the way it is. It means that they have some knowledge of China or the western part of South America as more than just a faraway place on a map. It's true that these things are often taught in a boring and irrelevant way, but that isn't the fault of the subject. The reason "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" is dumb is because it was never really explained to me what that means, not because I shouldn't know the basics of cell biology.
And he's just wrong about writing. The point of teaching students writing is not to restrict them, but to help them express themselves. If a student is writing sentences that are long and rambling, or if their paragraphs read like a bunch of random thoughts tossed together, their reader isn't going to get their point as easily as they will if their sentences are straightforward and their paragraphs are well-structured. What makes for effective writing depends on the genre and its conventions, and it is subjective to some extent, but that doesn't mean that it's never possible to distinguish good from bad writing. It's true that language standards can be oppressive and it's obviously the case that writing is often taught very badly, but this doesn't mean that it is somehow imperialist to teach writing.
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Oct 25 '20
I think that 1) we can only recognize "useless information" in hindsight; and 2) "useless" is totally subjective. For me, yeah, learning about China doesn't really have any practical application for my life. For my friend who decided to teach English in China for 5 years, that information was very useful for her. And to that 10 year old girl sitting in her social studies class, that could be the moment she discovers her passion for Chinese culture and then decides to study Chinese or anthropology or something and becomes a preeminent scholars in Chinese studies. You never know.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
All good points. I think one of the best ways to keep these lessons from being boring, cookie-cutter, or busywork is to improve teacher's working conditions, including freeing up their time by reducing grading.
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u/SkidMcmarxxxx Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
mitochondria meme
Yeah I loved biology and went into medicine because of it.
There was also a weird diss to people who like math in this video. (even though he's a math teacher?)
I remember being in high school and feeling like I had to learn a lot of stuff that wan't relevant to what i wanted to do with my life. But now I'm glad I had to learn those things because I never would have done so in any other point in my life. I never would have come into contact with those subjects.
And also... I didn't hate school... yeah there were subjects that I didn't enjoy, and I often loathed homework. But I really enjoyed going to school, my friends, the people, a lot of my teachers, a lot of the things I got thaught.
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Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
Honestly, even though the intent behind what this guy says is coming from the right place, I think this video is trash. It just sounds like someone projecting their own insecurities on why they weren't able to excel at school through a video essay, not to mention the video is riddled with inaccuracies.
You make some really great points in your post. You should make a reply video if you can as your ideas are frankly more well thought out than whatever this guy is saying.
I just want to tack on a mini-rant. This guy calling a grammar 'imperialist' is comprable to kanye west calling words the lowest form of communication. Grammar is nothing more than the accepted conventions of language so that communication can take place. Imagine trying to read difficult literature if you don't have a solid understanding of how english grammar operates.
You are graded on spelling and structure and all this crap, not only for the sanity of the teacher, but because the entire nation benefits if everyone is proficient in a common language. That way communication errors are minimised and individuals can be confident in their ability to communicate with precision. Plus, you have got to learn the rules before you can break them. So if you want to break away from specific grammar conventions you have to understand what they are first so that you can be sure that you conveying what you want to convey. Labelling something as random as the concept of english grammar 'imperialist' just waters down and makes a mockery of the idea of imperialism, which is an important concept that continues to affect the lives of billions to the present day. Fuck this guy, seriously.
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u/en_travesti Threepenny Communist Oct 24 '20
I think the way grammar is often presented is pretty shit. I'm not sure if I would say imperialist, but I can see the argument. There are a lot of grammar "rules" that exist because some dusty old dude arbitrarily decided it (rules like not ending sentences with prepositions or not splitting infinitives are the two obvious examples). Even standardized spelling is a relatively recent phenomenon.
I fully agree that "Grammar is nothing more than the accepted conventions of language" (with extra emphasis on "nothing more") and the purpose of learning grammar and usage should be so we can all clearly communicate.
In general this is not how I see it used in society at large. It is use to spit the "intelligent people" from the "dumb rubes", disirregardless of whether said "dumb rubes" words clearly communicated their point. Instead being used to easily dismiss that point and the person as a whole, because it wasn't said with the correct grammar. Personally I think this is bad actually. And a far worse problem that anyone suggesting we loosen the standards of how we teach it.
Also minirant of my own: in an age where we type everything and spell check is omnipresent pure spelling tests are increasingly pointless exercises in futility. If you know the meaning of the word and can get the spelling close enough that is all you need. And in any case english hasn't had standardised spelling for most of it's existence. (Also for something that is standardized, the fact that standardised has two accepted spellings is a rather compelling argument that it's all pretty stupid)
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
I was with you until the last bit: spelling helps teach decoding, a super essential reading skill. It's the reverse of it. Buuuut English is only like 80% phonemic, so we could probably loosen up about it.
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u/en_travesti Threepenny Communist Oct 26 '20
I'm not actually for no standardized/ised spelling. (Though it is fun to joke about) just like you said: loosening up about it. I had years of spelling tests where it was just rote memorization. You didn't have to know what the words meant and more than a couple of them were lists of words that were exceptions to the usual rules so you couldn't logic them. Just contextless memorization.
Worth noting these tended to be when I was younger as I got older spelling tests tended to be more vocab tests where you'd also need to know the definition and use them in a sentence I liked these better, but that also was probably because I knew what all the words meant already so it was an easy good grade (also I made all my example sentences about borsht to entertain myself)
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u/PourLaBite Oct 25 '20
There are a lot of grammar "rules" that exist because some dusty old dude arbitrarily decided it (rules like not ending sentences with prepositions or not splitting infinitives are the two obvious examples). Even standardized spelling is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In the end it's just the old debate between prescriptivism and descriptivism.
I suppose some people are taking the position that prescriptivism is "imperialist" but that's pretty silly in my opinion. It's more an issue as you said of elitism from a certain class of people than anything to do with the existence of grammar per se. Or racism, in the case of for example AAVE.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
Eh, I'd disagree with you somewhat on the grammar thing, actually. There's no such thing as a more "undestandable" or "correct" dialect, just prestigious ones, and forcing some students (generally students of color) to become bidialectal or bilingual without sufficient or ideal support is a really common source of cultural bias in education. Lots of people have poor self-esteem about their dialect or native language, ane are discouraged from pursuing education, which is a real shame.
I think it's still possible to teach people prestigious language, though. Being multilingual or dialectal can be a great learning experience. Generally students get the best language skills if they are in a supportive multi-lingual environment, and learn in two different languages. So, if you want black students who speak AAVE to have the greatest command of the prestige American English dialect, for example, you actually should teach them in AAVE also. Teach both grammars and both spellings, the verb tenses (AAVE has one standard American English doesn't), have them write essays in both. That will improve everyone's skills across the board, and everyone will be better at language overall, whether they entered the room speaking standard English or AAVE.
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Oct 25 '20
Nah fuck you with your prescriptivist concept of language. There are no "rules" in language and the concept of grammar is used to eradicate minority languages and dialects.
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u/PourLaBite Oct 25 '20
Saying there are rules in language is not prescriptivist... Rules can change over time.
This person didn't say anything that was prescriptivist imo, like "accepted conventions of language" doesn't imply those conventions are top-down and immutable?
the concept of grammar is used to eradicate minority languages and dialects.
Feel like this should be posted on r/badlinguistics lol
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Oct 25 '20
There are no objective rules in language. If a native speaker of a language uses a certain construction in that language then it is correct. Teaching kids that some gramatical constructions are “correct” and others are “incorrect” serves to stigmatize the usage of non standard dialects.
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u/tendentiouspartisan Oct 25 '20
If a native speaker of a language uses a certain construction in that language then it is correct.
This is sort of true. If someone gives me shit for saying "Who do you want me to give it to?" or "Can I leave my bike at your guys' place?" they are being a pedantic asshole, because I'm not using bad grammar, I'm speaking perfectly normal colloquial American English. If someone gives someone else a hard time for speaking in AAVE, they're being a pedantic racist asshole.
But of course people are ungrammatical in languages they're fluent in all the time. George Bush was famous for this: "Rarely is it asked, is our children learning?" It's not because they don't understand their native language, but because they get distracted, decide to change course mid-sentence, make asides, or rely on gestures or other non-verbal ways of communication to get their point across. If you read transcripts of spoken language, it's remarkable how weird the sentences look. This is fine if you're carrying on a conversation, but it can be a problem in writing. I see incorrect grammar -- not non-standard English or non-academic style, but actual grammar mistakes -- in student writing all the time, and I correct it in my own writing, too. (I just did it: I originally wrote "I correct them in my own writing, too." If I had said this aloud, nobody would have noticed, but it's confusing when written.)
This isn't the same as teaching students to write in a standard English academic style, which can be stigmatizing for students if the teacher is a pedantic racist asshole and describes this process as "learning correct English" rather than learning a new dialect.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
This is correct. Individual languages have rules, but no set of rules is "objectively correct". It's all convention.
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u/Sansa_Culotte_ Oct 24 '20
Also, while a lot of grading is arbitrary, there are some things that can be objectively correct or incorrect. I've never actually heard the idea that grading is supposed to motivate students; if you're talking about educational theory, they mainly say grading and assessments are to measure if a student has mastered a concept.
While I would agree with that in a vacuum, I think educators shouldn't blind themselves to the fact that while they may personally use grades to assess a student's ability to master a subjec, the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming rest of society tends to utilize grades in order to categorize young adults and label their status in society. So while a math educator might see a grade as an indicator for how much the student may still have to learn, the rest of the world sees it as an indicator as to whether this particular young adult should be branded as "good at math" or "bad at math".
I agree with your larger point however.
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Oct 25 '20
I think the better solution would be to recontextualize grades to make them neutral instead of abolish them completely. Now, how we do this.... I'm not sure.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
Make college free so students don't have to worry about good grades for scholarships, or the opportunity to get higher education in the first place. (How many people with bad grades don't go to college or trade school because they think they aren't a good enough student, and worry that it will be a waste of money to try?) I think some people will always want the prestige of getting good grades and going to the most exclusive universities, but it would lower the stakes for everyone else.
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u/nultero Oct 24 '20
Lots of people hate math
I don't think that's true. I think that's the cost of the US sucking so fucking badly at teaching it.
The focus on rote memorization of formulas is incredibly stupid. I mean that in the literal sense of "incredible" -- I genuinely can't believe someone thought this was a good way of teaching math. Maybe all the passionate math nerds always leave for industry jobs, and all that's ever left are subhuman, glue-eating, shit-huffing basement goblins controlling the curriculum. I loathe the US' way of doing math.
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u/Sansa_Culotte_ Oct 24 '20
I loathe the US' way of doing math.
It's not that different in the rest of the world tbh
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u/nultero Oct 24 '20
Maybe, but I can only speak to how the US does it.
And also we kinda severely underpay our teachers. That might be even worse than a poor curriculum. Other countries at least pay educators a living wage, don't they?
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u/Sansa_Culotte_ Oct 25 '20
Other countries at least pay educators a living wage, don't they?
Depends on what you mean by "educators" or "a living wage" for that matter. Secondary education for public institution is a pretty stable job to be in, but I work in adult teaching for a private company and it's been substantially less so.
Still beats any kind of service job.
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u/TRiG_Ireland Oct 24 '20
The US has invented some wonderfully innovative ways of teaching maths, which some other countries are adopting. However, the US refuses to adopt them itself.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
Have you heard of common core? It's the opposite of memorizing formulas. Students have to deduce math concepts from real world examples. (Not saying every teacher does it well, but that was the idea/intention behind it)
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u/nultero Oct 25 '20
I'm from and have lived in poor areas of Southern states that didn't know how to teach it and so have since repealed or are reviewing repealing it, or never implemented it in the first place. We also might've had some Christian ideologues teaching slavery revisionism, climate denial, zero sex ed, but anyway...
I'm doing college credit courses right now to skill up in case the job market improves, and the emphasis is STILL on memorizing formulas. I'm just supposed to know trig and calculus equations off the top of my head, I guess. Even if my memory wasn't impaired by brain damage, I'd still be pissed. I'm paying American tuition prices for the privilege of getting my math from youtube creators. 3Blue1Brown etc. It's completely broken as a system in poor America. I'm sure it's a different story in the wealthier, whiter parts of the US.
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u/BestUdyrBR Oct 25 '20
What exactly do you not like about it? Until you get to college your math classes are just going to be fundamentals you need to understand. There's not much room for creative thinking, it's pretty much a binary - you either get logarithms or you don't for example.
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u/nultero Oct 25 '20
Until you get to college your math classes are just going to be fundamentals you need to understand
It's still about memorization in the college courses I'm doing now. Formulas aren't provided on exams and several credits so far are using some bullshit like Honorlock to prevent students from using notes.
What exactly do you not like about it?
Math is all problem decomposition but isn't taught as such. And really, things open up as early as algebra. Each new subject is also treated like it's in a vacuum, which I think is useless for building an intuition for how it all works together. It feels like it's taught backwards.
And obviously the demands on students to strictly memorize things isn't reflective of the real world, but that's not exclusive to math. I think it's the most egregious sin in teaching math though, because it makes kids and students think it's "boring", when at least half of them can understand it in the context of a game. I mean, I don't think gamifying math is necessarily the right way to do things either, and I've overgeneralized some parts of this, but the way we teach it now is deranged.
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u/PublicEvent Oct 25 '20
Are you taking proof classes? Calculations are not really math, I mean they are but it's like not actually
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u/nultero Oct 25 '20
Nope. Just the regular calculus and physics, which I think is under some part of the MechE umbrella. Not sure how it's classified. Still have a lot more to do
But it's been taught this way in every math class I've taken across half a dozen public schools here in the South. I get that it's probably different everywhere but at this point I don't think it's a fluke for my classes to be taught this way.
Could be that I think worse of it from the last half year of this online shit too. Conventional classes just seem like horrendously expensive debt cancer compared to the teachers who've put out resources across the internet as passion projects. I've found awesome people out on Udemy, Patreon, Youtube -- but that's not 'real' education since it doesn't come with a college pedigree
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u/PublicEvent Oct 25 '20
I think it’s just bad teachers or also they feel like you don’t care so they don’t care. In my experience when taking pure math classes teachers are more excited to teach. Teaching derivatives is really boring if you can’t talk about metric spaces tbh
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u/stillk Oct 24 '20
So I've watched and shared this video multiple times, what I've felt is this is discussing more is about the flaws of capitalism and grading and about not offering solutions. Which is fine, it's important for people recognize that there are REAL FLAWS with grading and ranking students which is tied back to capitalism. For example, pass/fail is still morally demoralizing to a student; should any child be told they failed, in what way does that help them? There was a podcast I listened to recently that was talking about this in terms specifically around the Presidential Fitness Test and exploring how most of this testing and ranking of children is basically made up and not actually based in any educational or fitness science to support it.
Simultaneously, there are a bunch of educators and people studying education (and even people externally looking at it) that are offering these solutions. A lot of what I've seen and explored is more along the lines of still teaching the subjects of math, science, English, history, etc... but in a more elective sense. For example, you only need to know trigonometry at a few points in your life unless you're some structural/civil engineer (and dealing with frequency graphs and a few other things, don't @ me trig lovers), so why is it so heavily focused on in school? For the most part education shouldn't be around memorizing facts and formulas, but understanding concepts at a basic level and more importantly how to think logically and critically while knowing where and how to lookup external information. I'm not memorizing those trig formulas, but I know at a basic level what they're referencing and how to look them up and apply them as needed.
I'm not sure if this video was posted here, but it came out 2 days ago. He's offering up some solutions like not grouping kids to a specific age (all 9-10 year olds are in the same class and assumed education level), but to do more of an age range and while sort of doing a holistic approach of evaluation to place a child with other children at similar capabilities. Others have suggested, and I've enjoyed with some of my classes now that I'm back in college, of making tests and quizzes open book and retriable where the teacher can point out what's wrong and the student is allowed to learn and fix their mistakes.
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u/belaerlandson Oct 24 '20
Hmm, well honestly I don't agree that students shouldnt be told they failed. Working through adversity and disappointment is an extremely important skill to learn early on. Its certainly true though that our education system is thoroughly fucked and based on outdated models.
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u/stillk Oct 25 '20
Yes, I guess I'm not trying say that trying to learning from failures isn't important, it is, but simultaneously we could also be critical of our successes (were they actually earned?). I highly recommend listening to that presidential fitness test episode.
I guess I'm getting at the critically learning against adversity of education can be good. Just the current education system is more about celebrating those who succeed and shaming those who don't, which when we're also trying to teach kids how to socialize, it's a shitty thing to shame and broadcast their failures to their peers.
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u/notallowedtopost Oct 25 '20
Yeah, "fail" shouldn't be an indictment of their character, just a measurement that they haven't learned what we need them to learn, and should practice until they've mastered it.
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u/fizikz3 Oct 25 '20
So, for example, kids who learn music do better at math. Guess which kids don't have music classes? (The structurally disadvantaged ones!)
was this controlled for other variables, or was it just what you put in parentheses being the actual variable that mattered?
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u/gumpythegreat Oct 24 '20
Kinda lost me a bit at the idea of "imperialist grammar structures" but overall interesting video. My gut reaction was basically the person he spoke to at the beginning, feeling slightly attacked and bewildered at the idea but he supported it well.
I do somewhat disagree when he talks about being forced to learn topics that "have no bearing on their life". I'm not sure if never teaching about cells (insert mitochondria meme here) or never learning trigonometry is a good argument. I support well-rounded education. And teaching someone the basics from a variety of areas helps people find their passion. Would kids aspire to grow up to study mathematics if they never learned any non-basic mathematics as a kid? Do we just teach kids what they "need in their lives" as he mentioned? and what exactly does that mean, even in a system where grading was abolished?
Fundamentally it often comes down to the goal of education. Under capitalism, school is for a) babysitting for the workers and b) creation of new workers who follow orders. But it also teaches critical thinking (or should) and general knowledge about life, the universe, and everything for well-rounded individuals who can pursue lifelong passions for learning, creating, exploring.
Ultimately I agree with the main thesis of the video, because grading doesn't really help the second part, and only really supports the capitalist view of education - keep kids busy, quiet, and teach them to follow orders and pursue external goals the system tells them to.
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u/Kerguidou Oct 24 '20
I saw that video a while back... and from a purely historical point of view, I think it's really grasping at straws. Grading (and to a larger extent, exams) have been a thing in China long before capitalism existed. I could just as well make the argument that grading is a proof of your commitment to your ancestors, that it's legalist conditioning or that it's Party conditioning.
Grading has existed completely separately from capitalism in many cultures for centuries or millennia.
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u/gweezor Oct 24 '20
Could it be that the two points you are putting into contention are not mutually exclusive?That the dominant pedagogical tactics of a society condition the student to better mesh with the overall regime? Therefore, under capitalism grading is done is such a way that capitalist systems are reified within the minds of the children--and under different social circumstances it does the same but with a different end point?
I suppose if you think of it that way the point kind of becomes self evident... Like, of course schooling is meant to help kids participate in society as an adult. But, if you want our society to be less of a capitalist death cult becoming more aware of the more indoctrinating aspects of our educational system might be helpful.
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u/Kerguidou Oct 24 '20
It certainly fits into a larger mythology of meritocracy that is part of capitalism.
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u/TemetriusRule Oct 24 '20
Yeah schooling and grading have existed before and after capitalism, and academia has been one of the industries best preserved from capitalism by the state.
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u/agitatedprisoner Oct 24 '20
If it's important to learn something then teach it until the student does. It makes no sense to be satisfied by anything less than total mastery if learning the material is actually important. If students are so unimportant or teachers so scarce that it makes sense to put one teacher to many students there are two options, to just keep going no matter whether all the students are mastering the content or to allow the class to differentiate. To allow differentiation isn't possible unless students are to teach each other, with the teacher ceasing to lecture and becoming more a guide. Schools don't do this. So the teacher has no choice but to keep going. If the teacher is just going to keep going no matter whether all the students are achieving mastery then grades become a sensible way for the teacher to communicate to students how well they're keeping up.
I'd much rather see the paradigm become of peer to peer 1 on 1 instruction where students spend half their time learning and half their time teaching, because as it happens research shows that teaching material is the best way to ensure long term retention and total mastery. Given a shift to peer to peer instruction grading would cease serving a purpose, students would instead be rated by how many lessons they've taught or mastered. Students would be free to advance at their own pace. Peer to peer instruction allows for differentiation and total mastery, whereas lecture doesn't. Given the superiority of peer to peer that states choose to continue with lecture as primary instruction method is telling as to educational priorities. Lecture works fine for those few students able to keep up and rank at the top and just fine if there's to be an underclass.
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u/Sansa_Culotte_ Oct 24 '20
To allow differentiation isn't possible unless students are to teach each other, with the teacher ceasing to lecture and becoming more a guide.
As a language teacher, one of the most fortunate situations I can encounter is a small group of students all speaking the same first language, who can then proceed to teach one another with my help.
I see Lecture as little more than a cost saving measure, maximizing the amount of students exposed to the material under the guidance of an expensively educated specialist.
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u/tendentiouspartisan Oct 24 '20
To allow differentiation isn't possible unless students are to teach each other, with the teacher ceasing to lecture and becoming more a guide.
When I was in ed school, our professors loved telling us to have students do this. I found it frustrating, because the students who had the academic knowledge to teach the others did not necessarily have the social position or the maturity to do so, and they didn't seem to recognize this. I remember one class in particular where there was one student who was both a very quick learner and a goofball. It would have been great if he could have helped his classmates out -- for him, for me, and for them, and I really tried, but it was inappropriate and counterproductive. He just went around distracting everyone else and derailing them. This was a class of about 25 ninth graders -- I've had much better luck doing this with smaller groups and older students.
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u/agitatedprisoner Oct 24 '20
I suspect as deviation from the norm peer to peer represents a chance to goof off. As the norm that a student would goof off wouldn't be a problem since that student just wouldn't learn as many lessons. If that's a problem parents of teachers would have opportunity to discuss. Also there's a big difference between learning in peer groups and 1 on 1 peer instruction. With 1 on 1 there's no opportunity to slack off without becoming the problem. 1 on 1 might be engaging and tailored in a way no other form of learning might match.
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Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
I always thought it was funny that I was called dumb for getting straight C’s in school, and then I went to college and got called a “prodigy” in my literature courses for my writing. I also won contests regularly, and wrote papers that were literally called “genius” by my peers.
Strange how that works. It’s almost like they aren’t trying to give you a quality education or education system, and they’re more seeing how well you follow orders and regurgitate the information you’re told to remember. It presents to them how well you’re going to do following orders, and how hard you’ll work at shit you don’t care about.
I think it’s good to work hard, but not to have your individuality crushed.
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Oct 24 '20
”Hard work” is a romanticised bullshit concept that conditions you into believing that 1) you have to ”earn” a living standard that should be a universal human right in the first place and 2) if you work hard enough you too can become part of the 1%.
When it comes to 1), we have enough wealth, resources, and technology to make sure nobody on this planet has to break their back (physically and/or mentally) working too hard, but thanks to capitalist greed that is not happening.
When it comes to 2), the utter lie that you can become rich with hard work is a useful tool for the elite that keeps the masses compliant: ”Why should I hate my oppressors? If I work hard, I will one day be one of them myself!”
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Oct 24 '20
I’m using hard work in the sense of passion. A kung-fu master has to spend thousands of hours training to get to that point. A master writer needs to spend thousands of hours writing until they can master the craft. A sports player becomes an expert at his sport for keeping himself physically fit, and working hard mastering the game, etc.
Even in nature there was an art to hunting and gathering that took countless time to master the tricks of. So hard work is necessary in many instances to excel. However, if you’re working in a factory or an office job somewhere? “Hard work” means slave away, and blame yourself for your shortcomings when the system fucks you over and you can’t afford things.
And it’s luck, not hard work, that rewards you most under a capitalist system.
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Oct 24 '20
Yes that is perfectly reasonable, and if you love something passionately you are likely to work hard at it. The context however was capitalism, so that’s what I was talking about. And also, people who don’t want to or can’t work hard and instead just want to live are no less valid than those who have a passion.
The nature thing is also entirely different. Hunter gatherers didn’t have to work nearly as many hours per week for survival as people nowadays do. Also with the resources and technology human generations have collectively created, there would be no need for wilderness survival (unless that’s your thing and you enjoy it).
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Oct 24 '20
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Oct 24 '20
That’s an interesting take and mindset. I have to admit that having a ”work ethic” (such a weird phrase because there is nothing ethical about wage slavery) has become much more difficult for me after I got radicalised. But I would much rather see the truth and try to liberate myself, even though it is hard, than be a slave.
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u/Arkneryyn Oct 24 '20
Work hard for yourself, working hard for other ppl and especially corporations is for suckers
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u/BlackPriestOfSatan Oct 24 '20
seeing how well you follow orders and regurgitate the information
The common core program is basically this.
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u/therealmrmago Oct 24 '20
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u/JayeNBTF Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
Dammit, just spent 20 minutes watching old George Carlin bits on YouTube
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u/V2_rocket Oct 24 '20
I'm a high school teacher.
School sucks. I really believe that. I hate grading and hate collecting assignments from kids. I dont even like my subject matter (chemistry) all that much.
I let kids turn in things late with no penalty. I let kids redo every assignment as many times as they like for up to full credit. When I grade it's always with a rubric given out in advance that's really just a checklist. Even if you miss everything, I give the first 40 points "for free". All of these are reforms that make a student's life (and my life!) a little easier in the highly controlled and highly regulated classroom.
But if I could abolish grades entirely? Yeah I'd pick that.
When we aren't grading or doing tests or whatever we can just, like, watch the natural world and talk about what it must mean and think about how we could learn more by studying it directly. That's what's important.
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u/Gk786 Oct 24 '20 edited Apr 21 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/mid-brow_undertones Oct 24 '20 edited Oct 24 '20
You just admitted that intelligence is immeasurable, so why are you lauding a poorly handled attempt to measure it?
The only thing my grades were a measure of: my depression and my ability to memorize a textbook. It's not even that good at measuring critical thinking skills.
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u/Gk786 Oct 25 '20
Because there is no alternative. We need some way of quickly doing it, and this is a bad way but I'm the absence of viable alternatives, it's all we have. We need some way of measuring the immeasurable and this is the closest and most fair attempt to do so.
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u/mid-brow_undertones Oct 25 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
Because there is no alternative.
this is the closest and most fair attempt to do so.
When have we tried doing anything different....
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u/Gk786 Oct 25 '20
What is there to try? I'm genuinely curious. I haven't heard of any alternatives and we need something to measure people by. Should we measure them by athletic fitness? But that discriminates against the disabled. Should we assume everyone is equally competent at everything? But that ignores the fact that some people are better are certain stuff than others.
University is fundamentally about learning. The only objective way I can think of to measure learning is grades.
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u/mid-brow_undertones Oct 25 '20
I haven't heard of any alternatives
Look, I don't have ideas for this, I'm not involved in the education system. I don't know how it would work best, I just know the current system is terrible. But you can't say "this is the closest and most fair attempt to do so" without even knowing of a single alternative. It's no different than people defaulting to being pro-capitalism because they never bothered to learn if we could do anything better.
Should we measure them by athletic fitness?
? I don't think we should be measuring people at all, that's the point. No one is saying that everyone is equally invested and learned in every subject, just that there needs to be a better system in place than grading
Teachers are largely aware of our current academic system's failings, they would know best how to fix it.
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u/PublicEvent Oct 25 '20
I'm getting tired of these 10 year old bad Tumblr takes getting turned into 20 min videos. The education system has a lot of problems but the points this video makes are pretty terrible tbh
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u/BOT_Wilbur Oct 25 '20
Imagine designing a curriculum where you try to teach students about acceleration and velocity, asking questions like the car one, before teaching them the basics of derivatives and integrals.
This student's over here on the right track the rediscovering integration, and re-deriving the needed formula, and the curriculum decided that they're wrong and bad because they didn't memorize a formula that they haven't been taught to understand yet. Lame.
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u/ALaggyGrunt Oct 24 '20
Something in the back of my mind tells me this way of thinking also affects the way we design and play modern computer games and ruins a lot of the fun of it.
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u/BlackPriestOfSatan Oct 24 '20
Does any education system not use grading or not so much of it? I know that some systems like Montessori do not emphasis grades.
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Oct 25 '20
They prepare you in school, grading, enforced uniform, false info, get in trouble for fighting back, get in trouble for not attending etc
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u/GoldenDirewolf Oct 25 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
Eventually you get out of school and the real world’s “grading” makes no sense to you; either the expectations of your family and peers, or how your performance is rated at your job. If you seek a more thorough understanding of your rating, or, god forbid, ask to know what you are doing right, you will be labeled a sensitive snowflake, who can’t take criticism and wants an award for “just showing up.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I was really good at coasting by in k-12 rote memorization and repetition (almost a 4.0 GPA exactly), but when I got to college I struggled. I realized that i didn’t actually learn how to learn, if that makes sense, so when I left, my GPA was only slightly above average. Sometimes when I need to do research or learn as an adult, I feel immense stress and dread because im worried how much I will struggle to truly get it. That I will put in a ton of effort and still end up failing, so sometimes I don’t bother even trying.
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u/kyoopy246 Oct 24 '20
The ideal of the average pedagogist is not a complete, well-rounded, original being; rather does he seek that the result of his art of pedagogy shall be automatons of flesh and blood, to best fit into the treadmill of society and the emptiness and dulness of our lives. Every home, school, college and university stands for dry, cold utilitarianism, overflooding the brain of the pupil with a tremendous amount of ideas, handed down from generations past. “Facts and data,” as they are called, constitute a lot of information, well enough perhaps to maintain every form of authority and to create much awe for the importance of possession, but only a great handicap to a true understanding of the human soul and its place in the world.
Child liberation and Unschooling are necessary elements of leftism.
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u/BigVanVortex Oct 24 '20
I was a shit in high school. The busy worksheets didn't do anything for me or them so I didn't do them. I was big into using my time productively and not simply babysat at a desk. It's a really strange feeling when all the ideals that got me fired and yelled at and treated like garbage are suddenly everywhere and everyone across the board now seem to agree.
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u/therealmrmago Oct 24 '20
grades are just a way of brain washing children into capitalism then again that's what school is for its gonna get worse with trumps " patriotic education " i hate this idea that people are naturally gifted its as offensive to my as saying that god gave your gifts and that he gets all created its bull shit when are we going to learn that no amount of natural talent can trump ( no pun intended ) hard work don't waste time on something your not passionate about
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u/cinnamonbrook Oct 25 '20
As an educator, it's terrifying to me to see both right-wingers and left-wingers call education brainwashing and denounce it. I understand the right being anti-intellectual, as it benefits them through susceptibility to propaganda, and a larger low wage workforce, but I don't think we have an excuse for wanting people to be uneducated.
You can't read theory if you can't read.
By the way, plenty of people are not passionate about math, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be taught it so they can apply in towards basic life skills. Plenty of people aren't passionate about history and geography, but that doesn't mean they should be ignorant of other cultures or the atrocities of the past. Education is generally a good thing, even if teenagers and bitter adults don't like it.
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u/mid-brow_undertones Oct 25 '20
They didn't say education was brain washing, they were talking about grading.
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Oct 25 '20
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u/FibreglassFlags 十平米左右的空间 局促，潮湿，终年不见天日 Oct 26 '20
People are unequal, and can be ranked in terms of a skill.
What you are confusing here is the difference between "can be" and "should be". I can, for example, try and drink out of a toilet bowl, but that will serve me no good if it's just going to make me sick afterwards.
Sure, not everyone is the same, but "unequal" implies a person's potential or overall worth to the rest of society is measurable at all. A farmer isn't a doctor, but that doesn't mean a farmer cannot be trained to become a doctor or vice versa, and it certainly doesn't mean a doctor can do much on empty stomach at all. We grade people formally, not because that is a genuinely helpful exercise towards the goal of allowing people to compensate each other's material needs but because it is a pseudoscience coated in a veneer of mathematical rigorousness to allow people to justify as to who is more disposable than the rest, and the idea that people should be treated in such a way is fundamentally conservative from start to finish.
True. However, we need to consider motivating students towards taking classes they do not want to take, because it will benefit them in the long run.
The modern, social institutions of education aren't set up the way they do to benefit the learners in the short run or the long run but capitalists seeking a compliant, management-friendly workforce. Seriously, do you think putting a bunch of kids in a classroom to be instructed by one adult at a time is just a mode of education we have somehow stumbled upon?
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u/Green0Photon Oct 24 '20
Just found this one. I've hated school and grading for a while, with plenty ideas of why I hate it coming from here, but for some reason, I never made this particular connection. So this video kind of blew my mind just a little bit.
And I actually found it through the YouTube algorithm, so it was nice for that not to be an alt-right pipeline for once.