In my experience, if you’re the smartest kid in your class, you’re not smart. You’re just in the wrong class.
Also, if you’re the dumbest kid.
But I’ll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don’t want everyone failing. You don’t want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say “These are the good schools/students and the bad ones”.
Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.
And with homework, grades are an approximation of how much your parents can help you.
The way I see it, you’re probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you’re shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin’ prison population by who scoring the lowestEh, my kids are the smartest in their class, and the only real option is to put them a year ahead, where they’re likely the “dumbest”. They’re still in elementary school, so I would really rather they spend their time enjoying their childhood instead of trying to catch up in school.
I was the same way as a kid. I did all the extras, was in “honors” classes, did “AP” (college credit) classes, and even went to the local community college while in high school and got a 2-year degree simultaneously with my high school diploma. I’m not some savant or anything, and if I skipped a grade at the wrong moment, I might have merely graduated a year early and not gotten that 2-year degree. My friend group also would’ve been impacted since I’d be a year different from everyone my age.
I was in the “smartest in the class” group when I moved from a major metropolitan area where my grade had several hundred kids to a rural school where my grade was 28 kids.
It really screwed me in college when I suddenly wasn’t the smartest in my class.
What’s important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with “common core” math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.
Prior to common core math, there was “new math,” which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song “New Math.” If you look up the song, you’ll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.
Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.
There are so many people online with no pedagogical training who rail against common core, but a lot of it is trying to bring education standards to be more skills based rather than whatever they were doing back in the day. Like high school English classes have standards like “can cite textual evidence to support identification of the theme of a text”, rather than shit like my old essays that teachers marked up like “missing comma, minus 0.5 points”.
There are so many people online with no pedagogical training who rail against common core,
Or training what so ever. I’m not sure how I finished a physics degree, but I’ll see a common core question that’s effectively about associative or distributive properties of multiplication and someone saying that’s not a thing. Often the kind of person that says algebra is obscured by the letters and one should just stick with numbers.
Which incidentally that example is the critical thinking everyone demanded schools teach
Yeah, which also goes along with the people who complain that their English teacher pointed out that the curtains were blue and that meant the character was sad. I know there are shitty teachers out there who maybe read out of a teachers guide that blue curtains = sad and that’s as far as the lesson went, but I bet in most cases the class was about noticing motifs and subtext and the only thing they came away with was “lol my teacher thinks curtains means something deep”.
And then those are the kind of people to complain later that the country is going to shit because no one teaches critical thinking these days, like you said.
It’s kinda funny because that larger trend is paralleled by my own personal trend. Back in grade school, I thought the math answer keys were useful information, useful enough to make learning it unnecessary.
Later on, I realized that the answers were meaningless without the context of the problem and put equal importance on the process as the solution.
These days, the solutions themselves are mostly just curiosities and it’s all in the process, which parallels life itself nicely.
Or in the context of video games, one frame displayed on the screen shows millions of results of a bunch of math being repetitively done as you play. Those solutions only matter for a brief instant before new ones are needed and the previous ones often just discarded, though occasionally saved and even sent out to the world for others to appreciate the brief moment they are relevant.
In an essay included in Expanded Universe, Robert Heinlein talks about his primary education in a one-room Missouri school house. He learned Greek, Latin, trigonometry (maybe calculus as well?), deep history, etc.
I can’t talk about Heinlein’s education, but my grandmother’s one was based almost exclusively in rote memorization. She “knew Greek” as in she could remember by heart sections of Greek texts and their translation. Same for Latin. History was learning by heart lists of kings, date of birth/coronation/death, but fairly little in depth understanding. Nowadays the focus in ancient languages in learning their culture and to translate, for history is learning not only dates but reasons and connections between elements.
We also care way more about having the same education for everyone, that was really no concern a century ago. Each school was doing whatever they wanted.
The “the same education for everyone” is truly problematic. “That’s right! It goes in the square hole!”
I was Dean’s list. Still occasionally trust a fart that I shouldn’t have trusted.
You and me both friend
No Anon Left Behind
Honestly mood. I’m doing my master’s degree having completed my bachelor’s pre-covid and this program is way too easy
And yet i still struggled. What does that mean?
undiagnosed adhd
