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PC alert PC alert --- what's next?

I know some of it is. Kids in the state I live in don't get letter grades in school until they enter the 4th grade.

Many sporting activities award trophies to all participants, and in some cases a formal "score" is never kept.

Some of this I agree with on a very basic, introductory level...other times I see it as not allowing kids to learn how to deal with....(sorry to use this horrible horrible term)....failure.

While it may have it's place with kindergardeners...I have to wonder why some "harsh reality" can't be a good thing for some older kids....
 
It's the PC Police and womens movement, Motokid.

I read an article in the news awhile back about some kid that was suspended from school for running at recess.
 
Everyone's a winner! "Deferred success"... you've got to be fucking kidding me. And I thought changing "fore fathers" to "fore framers" in the U.S. was bad. You failed you stupid child! There was no success in any of this! You got an "F", or a "check -" or a "top-alphabet-character-deficiency"! How are kids going to learn success if they think everything they do, whether good or bad, is some form of success? Don't give a trophy to every kid on the last place team of the sport they play, give them a giant "Loser" ribbon and tell them to try harder. There is such a thing as failure. ****!
 
This is just stupid. Is there anywhere in the world where children aren't being treated as being more fragile than an egg under a steam roller?
 
All through primary school we never got letter grades. We just got a scale of 'Excellent, Very Good, Good, Needs Improvement'. I don't see anything wrong with that. Letter grades don't make much sense to kids anyway, I don't think. It takes a while to realise what each means, and the fact that different teachers mark on different scales.

We also used to get ribbons from sporting events right down to 5th place. I don't see anything wrong with that - it was about participation, not necessarily about winning.

Since I've been at university in North America I've seen far to much emphasis in sporting events on being 'the best'. At my university the options for sporting competition other than varsity are pretty much minimal. There's not a lot of people who like to play for fun. I think that's really sad. At my university in Melbourne every sport had 5 to 10 teams for each sex, and would compete at the relevant level. You could pick up a hockey stick, cricket bat, football, soccer ball, etc having never done so before in your life. Perhaps not all institutions in North America are like that, this is my only experience, but I see nothing wrong with encouraging kids to play for fun. Let kids be kids.

All that being said, I think 'deferred success' sounds like bollocks. I agree 'failure' sounds harsh and has a sense of finality and absoluteness to it, but surely there are other words that can be used instead.
 
Why is "A" "B" "C" "D" and "F" any harder to understand than Excellent, Very Good, Good, Needs Improvement?

Show me any kid who does not know that "F" stands for fail, and "A" means you "aced" it.

When grading scales of:
90% - 100% = A
80%-89% = B
70%-79% = C
60%-69% = D
59% or below = F

and all papers and tests are graded, and scored as such, then I think that speaks loads compared to "Good" or "Very Good"
 
"Let kids be kids" is an excellent idea. But don't teach them not to improve or not to try harder. Don't teach them that no matter how bad they suck at something, they should never have to worry about sucking. Teach them to be competitive. While all sports should be played with the intent of having fun, there should also be some form of competition involved.
 
Motokid said:
90% - 100% = A
80%-89% = B
70%-79% = C
60%-69% = D
59% or below = F
Click to expand...
On the same lines, I am annoyed when children receive grades over 100%. There is on such thing as 105%. There is no "A+". 100% is a perfect score. You can't be better than perfect. "Good job, son... this is your second check+++ this year!"
 
Our school are a travesty, it's no wonder kids think Canada and Mexico are part of the US.

The big movement was for the most part, to do away with competition. Competition drives boys more then girls, and we can't have advantages for boys. Treat them all the same. Now in many classrooms, boys are treated like girls and are expected to act just like the girls by sitting quietly in the classroom with their hands folded in their laps. Now add that to the the PC police banning activities at recess that might lead to injury, however slight. Well, we know boys and girls are plugged in the same. Of course, you can't say that because the pc police will lock you up, but it's the truth. Boys need to get out and run off their energy but are being allowed too. As a result, the boys are having more of a problem sitting still, they figit more, pay attention less. Then the next step, teachers cry that they can't control the children and demand that they be put on medications for AD or ADHD. Now you have huge numbers of children in school that are on some kind of med, typically ridilin. I was shocked the first time I was by the school for my son when they were giving out the afternoon dosage and saw a line that went down a long corridor and disdisappeared around a corner. Shocking. What you find out is that it doesn't take much to get these meds for the children. It used to take a battery of tests and a couple of doctors before they would even think about it. Now a doctor just asks some questions and a perscription is written. By the way, girls in the US are now two to three times more likely then boys to move on to college. So what happend to parity? Blast the womens movement to hell where they belong.

I'm glad our days of raising children is almost over. No way I'd even think about raising children in this society. No way in hell.
 
The good thing about this trend is that in a few more years you'll never be able to be fired from a job. I mean, hell if you can't fail in school how can you fail anywhere else?
 
Maybe. Or maybe it'll hell for the children when they have to go out and face the real world.
 
Motokid said:
The good thing about this trend is that in a few more years you'll never be able to be fired from a job. I mean, hell if you can't fail in school how can you fail anywhere else?
Click to expand...
Motokid, sorry to be the one to inform you, but the term is not "fired" anymore, but is now the politically correct "occupation reinstated".

With regards to the whole Ritalin/AD/ADD/ADHD/Whateverthefuckitscalled epidemic, I think putting children on healthy diets (instead of the typical "soda & fries" diet), limiting television intake (good god! 10 hours a day?), and getting them out of the house to run and play, can make for less twitchy kids in our society.
 
sirmyk said:
Motokid, sorry to be the one to inform you, but the term is not "fired" anymore, but is now the politically correct "occupation reinstated".

With regards to the whole Ritalin/AD/ADD/ADHD/Whateverthefuckitscalled epidemic, I think putting children on healthy diets (instead of the typical "soda & fries" diet), limiting television intake (good god! 10 hours a day?), and getting them out of the house to run and play, can make for less twitchy kids in our society.
Click to expand...

:eek: What? Healthy diet and exercise. How can you live with yourself?
 
If losing and failing are looked at as the end-all, be-all of horrible-ness, then how well are people going to be able deal with it when it happens? The only way to not let it bother you is to have it happen enough that you realise it's not the end of the world, and that you need to try harder, put more effort in, or try a different tactic in order to succeed. Success is a state of mind. Failure is a state of mind. Is it better to learn this at an early age, or later in life when the successes, and failures carry so much more weight?

Failure can beat you down, or motivate you to try harder. Changing the name of it does not change the outcome.
 
At the risk of being dull, there is no plan or desire by anyone to replace the term 'fail' with 'deferred success' in UK schools. The motion was proposed by a retired teacher as a deliberate piece of get-people-debating outrageousness, and it looks as though it worked.

Liz Beattie, a retired teacher, will call on the association's annual gathering in Buxton, Derbyshire, to "delete the word 'fail' from the educational vocabulary to be replaced with the concept of 'deferred success'".

She told the Today programme on BBC Radio Four she had deliberately made the motion provocative to spark a good debate, but said it reflected the way the education system was developing.

"We have made so much development in recent years in making examinations more flexible, doing them in modules so you can concentrate on different parts of them at different times," she said.

"What happens when an exam is failed but, for example, three-quarters of it is perfectly satisfactorily done? It should be possible to do the other bits as add-ons afterwards and to defer the success of the exam."
Click to expand...
 
I'm glad to read that there are no plans to bring this into effect. What a load of utter rubbish! If you do not obtain the results required for a pass then you fail, simple.
 
sirmyk said:
On the same lines, I am annoyed when children receive grades over 100%. There is on such thing as 105%. There is no "A+". 100% is a perfect score. You can't be better than perfect. "Good job, son... this is your second check+++ this year!"
Click to expand...
I have never seen anyone receive higher than 100% - an A* does not denote that the grade is above 100%, it merely denotes that you were in the top 10% (I think) of the A grade students in the country.
 
On the contrary....you get a perfect score giving you 100% which is an A+

an "A-" would be scoring 90% - 93%

an "A" - 93%-98%

and an "A+" for 99%-100%

then there's extra credit problems that exceed the scope of the test, and is for those kids who really know the shit out of the subject...

possibly giving a score above 100%....
 
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