The weighted grades are only part of my pissing – not recognising the top 10% is the other part (of the OP, which is only a part of a larger issue). Yeah, weighted grades or not, why the hell can’t the top 10% get some kind of recognition? A nod at least? Actually – because there will be no more weighted grades, why can’t the top 10% get recognition? Does it have any bearing on whether or not you get into a better college? IDK. That’s not the point. <personal blanket statement alert>The point is, mediocrity is celebrated, while excellence is ignored, because someone might get his panties in a bunch over hurt feelings.</pbsa>
For being in the top 10% of the class, all I got was a picture in the yearbook (one of many, since I also had a few other awards for other stuff) and I think a little stupid piece of paper saying such. Big whoop in the long-term of my life, but as a teenager, I thought “cool, someone sees something in me.” I should point out that for me – a child whose parents stopped even looking at my report card when I was a freshman – it meant a lot to have even such a small pat on the back. I knew I wasn’t going to college right out of high school – we didn’t have the money, and according to my mother, I wasn’t going to amount to shit anyway. Maybe because of my personal experience, I feel so strongly about this, but remember – it’s not the kids who are doing great whose parents scream and yell and get the rules changed, it’s not the kids who don’t have parents who give a shit that get the rules changed for them – it’s the ones who are mediocre and whose parents can’t come to grips with that mediocrity and so don’t want to be reminded of it. Ugh. I am stepping off my soapbox now, but there it is.
Maeglin and Marley23 – I think we shall have to agree to disagree on this. Even now, I work with people that are the result of celebrating mediocrity. I know all of my daughter’s friends and classmates and I see in them the celebration of mediocrity. I actually considered going to the effing school at one point because one of her teachers made fun of her because she has a huge vocabulary and he didn’t understand what she was saying. He said, “you don’t need to use such big words, this is just high school, who are you trying to impress? I’m not impressed that you can use big words that I don’t understand.”
Do either of you have kids in school right now? It’s a question, no implications. I am honestly just curious.
I have a much better understanding of where you are coming from. My opinion is heavily informed by my own experience, so I have not experienced it at all from your point of view.
There’s an old joke that goes something like, how do we really know Jesus was Jewish? The answer is, because he believed his mother was a virgin and his mother told him he was the son of God.
My growing up wasn’t exactly like this, but I won’t deny that I was encouraged to believe in the power of my dreams, perhaps a little too much. All of the praise and reinforcement only made it worse. It made it harder to adapt socially and it made it harder to make my way in the world. I totally see where you are coming from, but good grief, I would have gladly traded in my yellow tassel and my SAT scores for a healthier and more realistic self-image.
I caught shit my whole life for using big words. Even in my ultra-competitive job fulll of thousands of other smart people, I still have to work on toning it down. I just love words. Some people talk to live, others live to talk. I am in the latter category, and most people aren’t. You just have to learn to adapt to your audience, because they sure as shit aren’t going to adapt to you.
This is a great example, because if I had learned better from a younger age not to trot out my $64k vocabulary, I am certain that my life would have been better for it. It’s a lot easier to learn those lessons when you’re young. There is nothing worse than blowing a presentation to a senior executive when you lose his attention because you use a funky word that he does not know.
Trust me. Your daughter needs to learn this. Now.
I do not have any children, though that will change soon. My wife and I have had extensive conversations about education. We are seriously considering homeschooling. We live in NYC, where both the public and private schools are toxic. There is also a substantial community of non-wingnuts who homeschool, so we could take advantage of its scale and opportunities for social interaction with other home-schooled kids. I have had kind of an unusual education and my wife is an artist who will be staying at home, so depending on the temperament of the child, this will probably be a good solution for us.
Mediocrity hasn’t been rewarded just because the AP weighting has stopped. Rewarding mediocrity would be giving non-AP students extra points. I’d be disappointed if I were your daughter, but not so disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to see the value in an AP education sans the extra GPA points. Her talk about taking standard classes next year shows me that somehow she’s missed the whole point of her advanced education.
I’m wondering if the reason weighting was dropped was because the school found the grades of AP students to be way overinflated, to the point that they were making kids taking standard and honor classes look remedial in comparison. Giving AP C’s a whole 4 points seems excessive to my eyes. AP English class was a challenge when I took it, but not so much of a challenge that C-level work would have earned me an A in the above-average English class. As it was in my class, C-level work was equivalent to a standard B.
Giving extra points for taking AP classes shouldn’t be looked at as a reward, but as a compensation. I suspect that the school looked at the grade distributions in all the different tracks and concluded that this compensation was unjustifiable at the level it had been. If a disproportionate number of AP kids are getting A’s, that is a sign that the AP classes aren’t challenging enough to warrant the extra weighting. So it makes sense to bring things back to the middle a little.
I just don’t see the point. They’re already in the best classes and getting good grades, learning more (one hopes), being recognized by colleges for challenging themselves… but it’s not sufficient unless they get an extra tassel or get to stand up and wave at graduation? Enough’s enough in my opinion. These kids did well, but if the accomplishment is blown out of proportion it does them a disservice.
But Litoris I agree with you that doing away with the first chair thing is wrong. I wasn’t exceptionally competitive when it came to grades (I earned good ones but I didn’t care about getting straight A’s for someone reason), but getting recognized as a strong player by chair placement gave me incentive to improve.
My high school did no relative weighting, had no AP classes but did have three academic tracks, and (possibly most relevant) printed the student’s class rank on EVERY REPORT CARD.
I think, Maeglin and Litoris, it depends on the source of motivation and other external factors the students face–I would probably have continued to excel in choir and band without the chairing (although I hold a great deal of pride for my first chair/section leader statuses in both) because excelling in a skill like band or athletics translates directly to being able to have better real-world results NOW. On the other hand, the fact that my class rank was printed on my report card (as a 1/100ish or 2/100ish) in every semester was the ONLY reason I worked as hard in high school as I did in the face of a heavily football-oriented PA coal-mining-area district–I was getting nothing but negative or neutral reinforcement for my academics from everyone in my life, including my parents (who adopted a “As are expected/required, not praiseworthy” attitude sometime during middle school), so my only positive reinforcement was my teachers and to a much greater extent my ongoing struggle with the (future) valedictorian (second place by 0.03% was fine with me, to be honest, since he got several free points from the way Gym was scored (due to being a varsity basketball player)).
I think what you might be forgetting, Maeglin, is that from the perspective of many teens, higher grades don’t get you any promotions at Burger World, they don’t get you any chicks at all, and depending on your parents they may or may not get you traction there. College can look a long way away when you’re a sophmore in high school. Career looks impossibly far off–and I’m your age, apparently, having graduated 12 years ago–and many college-bound kids will not be mentally planning things in terms of effect on their careers until they are already in college. Grades, in short, are too abstract a reward for at least some kids.
Maybe better training in self-motivation and long-term planning are required, but if teens as a class were any good at long-term planning, we’d call them adults.
Recognizing an accomplishment isn’t the same as blowing it out of proportion. Your argument sounds a little like one of those parents who gives their kids savings bonds for their birthday instead of toys, because they’ll be worth something someday and better for the kids in the long run. Yeah, all those things you mentioned are important (arguably more important in the long run than recognition) but these are teenagers. A little pat on the back and recognition in front of their peers–a little chance to be “special” for a brief time because of something they worked to earn–is not unreasonable, in my opinion.
Among other things, I was a very serious musician in high school. I was first chair in my highly competitive all-county, and had I not broken my fucking hand (grumble) I was a credible contender for all-state. I was so ready for that audition, too.
I wish we didn’t have competitions for chairs. It demotivated everyone else, who didn’t even bother because they did not think they had a shot at any kind of recognition. Learning to play and blend together is so important when you play in an ensemble. The other students wouldn’t even try to learn the knottier parts. They would just pretend and let me play them. This wasn’t a clarinet section; this was embarrassing. A little more encouragement of the kids who could have benefitted from being encouraged would have produced a stronger group and happier people overall.
I didn’t need any encouragement. I could breeze through the Mozart, the Brahms, and the Weber. I could even hack the Copeland and the Stravinsky. Let me tell you, that is is an achievement. The Stravinsky is fucking hard.
I would have given first chair to anyone who wanted it. But no, it had to be a competition for a recognition I would have loved to forego.
There was another strong trumpet player and oboist in the same boat. By senior year, the trumpet, oboe, and clarinet sections were decimated beyond the level of typical high school attrition. I couldn’t have stopped playing in the school group even if I had wanted to, because there would have pretty much been no other clarinet players left.
And yet, I don’t see giving someone an extra picture in the yearbook and a piece of paper as blowing it out of proportion. In fact, I think it’s just about perfect proportion. My graduating class was around 1200-1300 kids, and the our “top 10%” (at least the year I graduated) was more like the top 2%, since they limited us to only 20 people in it – we didn’t get special tassels or privileges at graduation, just the picture and the award paper. I got my special little extra stripe or some such on my diploma cover for graduating SCL, but nothing else at graduation. It was a minor thing, and I hate to see it gone, because to a teenager (not all teenagers have parents that tell them how wonderful they are all the time), it’s a big deal. Especially when the other students are giving you shit about being a nerd or a dork because you consistently make excellent grades and are in the honors classes.
A few people keep mentioning how it’s unrealistic because it won’t relate to college and I beg to differ. I did get a special sash and tassel and whatever else for graduating SCL from my college. Since I went to college as an adult, I felt like a dork in the special clothes. All of my fresh-out-of-high-school peers, however mentioned that they wished they had done better to get the special sash/etc. That puts it in perspective – at least to me.
Again, we shall just have to agree to disagree. I doubt that you could type anything that would change my position, and I have no interest in changing yours.
As a side note, I do find it funny that more people seem to be up in arms about the no first chair in band than not recognising academic excellence. Maybe we have more band geeks than book nerds here on the Dope?
Well, music chairs can be awarded in reasonable and unreasonable manners.
I see nothing wrong with recognizing merit whatever the endeavor. Ought the school allow the least athletic kid to start as quarterback? Make up their math or debate teams out of the remedial classes? Give the chorus solo to a tone deaf kid?
Of course I will not say that any one area of endeavor, whether academic or otherwise, should be presented as the only accomplishments worth note. To the contrary, the school should work hard at identifying activities that will appeal to all of its diverse population. Recognize the ESL students, as well as the forensics team. The charitable clubs, as well as the sports teams.
But it just seems a little wacky to me to have the football team receiving a stadium’s cheers, while denying the eggheads recognition as being on the dean’s list. Why is it the academic achievers who should be satisfied with their personal appreciation of their accomplishment?
I think chairing is important because orchestra/band is a group activity. Grades, in contrast, are earned as individuals.
Chairing recognizes the different skill levels of individuals within a group, and creates examples for weaker players to model after. Ultimately this hierarchy benefits the whole group, because the stronger player who wants to preserve his status has no choice but to stay on his toes by practicing, while the weaker player who wants higher chair status will try to get that by practicing more. It’s sleigh dog dynamics at work, in a sense.
Competitiveness for grades doesn’t yield these kinds of group benefits. For one thing, outside of close friends and family, who is going to know someone else’s GPA? It’s generally considered uncool to go around wearing your GPA on your forehead. In contrast, everyone in band/orchestra will know where you sit in the hierarchy, so it makes more sense that you’d care about competing in that setting.
That said, I definitely think the top 10% should be recognzied, generally speaking. However, in your school’s case, perhaps the idea to scrap it has something to do with the point I made earlier. If grades have been inflated to the point of abuse (and I’m not saying that they have been…only threw out that possibility), then the scale is tilted in favor of students in AP classes. It’s conceivable that many students in the honor and standard classes are going unrecognized even though they have really high grades, and only because AP students have devalued their GPA’s.
Probably in a couple of years, when all the AP kids have graduated and the GPAs have normalized, they’ll go back to recognizing the top 10%'ers.
I have to say I agree with your daughter to a point. I remember seeing the class rankings on the back of the graduation program and seeing that I was number 12. 7 kids of the 11 ahead of me had made a point of not taking the harder classes. They weren’t in the advanced math track; they skipped physics; some of them skipped chemistry! It bothered me to know that I had worked hard to take the hardest classes and still be ranked below the Mickey Mouse Club.
However, I’m willing to bet I did a lot better in my college math and science courses than the Mickey Mouse Club did. I also got a lot of satisfaction from challenging myself to take the hardest courses. I even had a lot of pride in knowing I was the only girl in my graduating class with the guts to take Physics. I loved that class and I loved having something that helped me stand out in a good way for once.
This was the boat my trumpet section was in my freshmen year. Two dominant players who were 1st and 2nd Chair First Cornet and squabbled over solos and crap. Fortunately, the trumpet section had an alternate solution–namely, we had the ability of splitting, depending on need and arrangement, into up to five sections with separate chairings. My Junior and Senior years, I made all-Region (just a hair off all-state both times), but elected to sit first-chair of whatever section needed the most encouragement. Since this usually put me in 1st Trumpet or 2nd Cornet sections, the kids who weren’t as serious got to lead sections they were suited to (depending on their playing style and range, there was a LOT of variety, especially when we took up a collection for the band to have a piccolo trumpet and a flugelhorn for the top screamer and melodic player in the overall section).
Having potentially seven “first chair” players out of a trumpet section of nine? Call it over-rewarding, but it worked–granted, now, it worked because there was a legitimate and non-manufactured variety of skill specializations required, and sometimes we had 2 subsections and no oddballs. But overall, it was great–We started my sophomore year doing this with a section of four kids–a freshman, a transfer student, a random junior who was the kind of slacker you describe, and me. I wish it would work as well for some of the winds that tended to have more people and fewer parts–although we DID do the same sort of thing with a pair of bass clarinets.
We didn’t do a lot of classical, but my senior year I got to do the trumpet solo from John Tesh’s “Barcelona” and the screamer part for a jazz arrangement of The Lion King–I’ll stack that against Stravinsky.
