Sound strange? Well it’s not. The Saskatoon Public School System feels it’s okay for kids to hand in stuff late without penalty and to copy and paste from wikipedia.
To sum the article up, marks are now separated for behaviour and academics. A teacher can no longer take off late marks for assignments not handed in.
More and more I am disgusted with my profession, especially since I’ve been yearning to move home to teach ever since I left. Oh well…I guess I’ll keep chugging away on another degree in the meantime.
What do you think? Does Saskatoon have it right? I think they are delusional. I think administrators have become such wimps that they will refuse to hurt a child’s feelings by giving them a zero. I remember losing marks for handing in items late when I was in school…it was the biggest motivation I ever had to get my assignments finished! I feel bad for the teachers who now will have to mark their student’s assignments over the holidays because students decide to hand items in just before graduation.
Sounds like the superintendent did some copy-and-paste as well when he was getting his education, or else he is an excellent bullshit artist who has an uncanny ability to give muddled comments.
I do get a little angry that people like this superintendent are gainfully employed when they clearly couldn’t find their ass with both hands and a GPS, while many intelligent people (some on this board even) worry about finding jobs that pay shit, and yet require some critical thinking skills.
Yikes! That is ridiculous. Depending on the class, my son (7th grade) loses 5-10% off the top for each day the assignment is late and no credit if it is a week late. He’s turned in a few late assignments in the past and the teacher would write something like, “You would have had an A (or whatever) if you’d turned it in on time.”
Guess what? My kid started turning his work in on the due date.
That’s just setting kids up for failure later in life.
Well, are there still consequences for turning in a late assignment that are separate form the grade on the assignment itself? That might be okay, if the consequences fit.
And what exactly is learned by ignoring deadlines and even plagiarizing? Wait, this isn’t like a finishing school for kids who plan to go into politics, is it?
Not a problem. Hand the report cards out with all A’s on the first day. Attach a note to the report card asking for a raise due to the high achievement level. Leave a note where to forward the check starting with Cancun.
When I was in school, if you didn’t turn your work in on time, it was not accepted and you got a zero. (Unless you had a darn good excuse, like medical or death in the family)
I do think with the Internet being so common teaching has to adapt though. I mean I never understood things like memorizing dates. Who cares. I mean we had to memorize EXACT dates of battles. Why? That’s a waste of time, as long as you know where to go to find it out.
As long as there are other consequences for late submission of work, it is a good idea. Grades should reflect what students learnt - it seems strange to modify them for the purposes of behavior management. When I look at a student’s past grades, I want to know how well they did in each subject. Hopefully the school also keeps a record of late submission of work and behavior problems. Each one is a separate but related issue. More information about each student is good.
I think its potentially an interesting experiment, as long as they check the actual outcomes.
Main thing Id be wondering about is what their alternative behaviour management strategies are, they arent outlined in the article and Im dubious theres none.
When I was in high school, I got my hands on a box of report cards, so I typed them out and mailed them to my friends’ parents. Penis ensued.
Saskatoon could save a lot of effort if it let the students write their own report cards. That way, if a report card was late, the parent could deal with the child directly rather than involve the teacher.
I don’t think it does a child any favours to lower the bar. Sooner or later, the rubber will meet the road, so students would be best prepared for the big bad world by learning that deadlines really are deadlines, and that there will be consequences for failure.
I agree there should be consequences and parents should be kept well informed. I am just saying that a grade can be a measurement of many things. I would prefer it to measure what skills a student has mastered or what they have learnt.
One of the schools at which I was a student had a very handy way of dealing with this sort of thing.
Academic offences were met with detentions in addition to grade sanctions. For example, assignments that were not properly completed resulted in detention (supervised study sessions).
Behavioural offences were met with defalulters. For example, rudness or not properly obeying directions resulted in defaulters (supervised work details).
There were three elements of this approach that made it successful.
First, it made the consequences tangible. Docking a few points on a few assignments is not tangible for most students. Having to spend an hour or two extra at school on the day of the infraction is very tangible.
Second, the extra attention provided by teachers supervising the detentions, and the teachers and senior students supervising the defaulters, helped address the needs of the students.
Third, the parents became more invested in their child’s development, at first simply by having the problem brought to their attention by their child being kept after school, and then if the problem became more frequent, by meeting with the teachers.
This makes me more angry than anything, and it has nothing to do with teaching kids responsibility. It shows that the superintendent, like so many others in the profession, don’t understand what homework does. Homework is very rarely all that useful in and of itself. Homework serves to prep the student for a given lesson in class, or reinforce what came before. It’s time-sensitive–what good does it do a kid to go back and read a section of a book and answer the reading comprehension questions when he has already sat like a bump on a log during the class discussion about the story? What good does it do a kid to go back and work 25 algebra problems when he’s already sat, clueless, through the next two days of class, unable to understand what’s going on because he didn’t ever come to understand the initial concept?
This sort of policy only makes sense if you think of assignments as coupons you turn in to buy a grade. The assignments are not the point, the learning is. A three-day old assignment is just busy work. What makes me so angry about these sorts of policies (and I’ve seen them before) is that they only make sense if all your assignments are busywork–if it’s all just hoops you jump through to earn a grade, then it doesn’t matter if it is done late.
The worst thing about such a policy is that now kids will opt to do busywork–assignments too late to actually benefit them–instead of current assignments that would help their class time be more effective. Furthermore, I promise you that the total amount of homework turned in will go down, because now kids can tell themselves that they will “do it late” and go play Xbox. But tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow they will tell themselves the same lie, until there is so much to do that they are overwhelmed, and then it’s all “fuck it, I’ll start over next grading period”. And I don’t even blame them, because if my system saw homework as “crap you have to do to make the teacher happy”, I’d take the same attitude.
Do you think that the threat of losing marks is a more effective than other consequences for not completing work? In my experience, kids often don’t have the judgement and foresight to make marking down effective in changing their behaviour.
I think it’s the only thing that is plausible for a teacher with 150-180 students. Detention programs are a nightmare to administrate and worse to enforce–if you assign detention and a kid refuses to come, your next option is to put him in in school suspension, further isolating him from learning. If a kid isn’t doing an assignment a week and never goes to detention, he could spend the semester in ISS–happy and stoned, usually.
And in any case, a zero for work not turned in is appropriate–it means you didn’t learn everything the course has to offer, and your grade should reflect that. I agree that taking points off for most late work is stupid–it suggests there is intrinsic value to the homework itself.
It’s not about consequences. I don’t really care what the consequences are. I just don’t want a kid thinking that if they go and make up a bunch of flashcards for a vocabulary quiz they already failed that it somehow redeems them. The flashcards in themselves are valueless. The act of writing them out is meaningless. The point was to have something to help them prepare for the vocabulary quiz.