This is something I probably shouldn’t blog before I shoot Cam an email, but I will anyway.  (Cam sent me an IM last night while I was on a call and had my back to the computer.  By the time I saw it, I was too tired to chat and fell asleep in my clothes.)

Anyway, he highlights the stupidity of a school district’s decision to stop releasing the honor roll.

High School principal Paul Richards has ended the practice of sending the list to the local media.

In an e-mail to students and parents, Richards said that Needham’s
high achievement levels have a dark side, creating a competitive
culture among students where grades are compared within groups and
argued over with teachers.

Get that parents?  Encouraging your kid to do well is a bad, bad thing.  They might compete.  They might even meet other kids who want to be at the top of their class and then they’ll be striving to make even better grades.  Damn you awful parents for breeding this kind of behavior!

Cam notes:

We’re more concerned with self-esteem than self-reliance these days, and that’s a bad trend.

I agree.  I say this as a girl who made the ‘All A’ honor roll every single quarter in high school and really could give a rat’s ass if it was announced in the paper.  I was already in the paper almost every week as it was with school activities, winning awards, volunteering at almost everything in town and generally being a decent citizen.

However, I did give into that temptation to argue with teachers over grades.  At least twice that I can recall off the top of my head.  The first time was with my government teacher who also served as the boy’s basketball coach.  (High quality education there, I know.)  He handed his grade book over the “smartest” kid in class and asked him to figure the averages and come up with everyone’s grade.  I argued this was illegal under privacy laws.  He tried arguing back, but I had done my research and he wasn’t any competition.

The second time was with the idiot biology teacher who hadn’t taken a biology course since her own high school class.  She majored in secondary education and felt qualified to teach anything.  She wasn’t qualified to teach at all.  Her teacher’s edition was stolen one semester and she knew the test answers had all been copied and passed around to some people.  Rather than looking at who had been stuggling and suddenly wasn’t, or even discussing unusual behavior/grades with other teachers who knew the individuals better and could likely finger the cheaters, she blamed a large group of students without evidence.  I was in that group because I was a “troublemaker.”  Anyway, I argued that if I was cheating, I would be getting 98-100% on my exams rather than the 90-96% I usually averaged.  I had a high average in the class because homework was frequent enough that those 100s were pulling me up.  Why would I be giving myself lower grades on exams than my homework?  In the end, I went in and took the final exam which had no manufactured key (handwritten by her) even though my grades and attendance level exempted me from the final and aced it.  She believed that though she had no proof, she was convinced I was cheating and giving myself lower grades.  I believe she was fired after attacking Hispanic students with racial slurs in class.  Bright one, she was.

Just to really make you guys hate me, I’ll also throw out there that in addition to being on the honor roll every quarter, being in National Honor Society and Oklahoma Honor Society, I never had detention and was even allowed to skip periods without punishment during my junior and senior years.

No obviously related posts.