Friday, January 22, 2016

Changing Grades for Emotional Health

Okay, just a short little snippet today.  I saw an article on schools that are now "changing grades" to "preserve the emotional health of their students."  Let me tell you something: you're preserving nothing.  If you think that the emotional health of a student is wrecked by a "bad grade," think how bad it's going to be when they get fired from a job as adults because their bosses won't change their "bad grade."  Teaching kids not to deal with emotions (especially sadness, frustration, anger, etc) is not TEACHING them anything.  Steps like this to "preserve their emotional health" is more about preserving YOUR feelings than theirs. 
My only other comment on this would be the following: this common core bull crap is setting up the kids to fail.  I am all for teaching kids multiple methods if they're not understanding something but teaching them 22 steps to do a problem that could take 2 steps is absurd.  There are plenty of CEO's and brilliant people in this nation that learned things in the traditional sense and have gone on to create great things and accomplish great feats.  Perhaps, we should focus less on creating a whole NEW system of learning and focus more on improving what was already working for so many.  Is it frustrating to have to memorize facts?  Of course.  Once you memorize those basic facts, is your life in math much easier? YES!  Stop testing the crap out of these kids and making things more complicated and maybe they won't be having "emotional issues" quite as often with their learning process.

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