I think that might be the biggest sin with today's school system. Big penalties for mistakes and optimisation for perfection (math and spelling tests). In reality you "want" to make mistakes, because that means you took risk. They are inevitable. Once you internalize it it's quite liberating. How quickly and well you recover from mistakes is much more important.
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Where I live, There's literally zero penalties for mistakes, at least up to highschool.
I'm sure it's possible to get a grade lower than an A, but you have to try really hard. My daughter didn't turn in a single assignment on time in 7th grade, and what she did turn in was honestly pretty crappy for every subject except math. Lowest grade was an A-.
Also college. My daughter took a class where she thought she did the minimum work possible. She got an A. She asked a TA how and was told that her work was so far in excess of any other persons’ work that she got an A. Everyone else received an A-.
The thing that bugs me the most is that by not docking points for late work, the teachers are teaching my daughter that deadlines don't matter. At some point, it will be necessary for her to get her work done on time, but it's really hard to convince her of this when her entire life experience tells her the opposite.
As soon as she is old enough we plan on making sure she gets a job; weird to say this, but I hope she gets fired for showing up late.
Why exactly /do/ deadlines matter? My experience has shown that with white collar work things are a lot more flexible than in school, sure there are "deadlines" but in almost all cases they are negotiated in advanced and lateness is accepted with, often weak, justification. The only thing college is more accepting of is tardiness but even with that you can get a lot of leeway depending on what company you are working for.
This is of course is a bit different for retail or blue collar work. It's kind of ironic that as you get payed more, the more you can get a way with.
Indeed. Deadlines only mattered in my life when in university and before. I can't say that I have had to deal with a genuine deadline in nearly three years now.
My first exposure to this was during my first serious internship. On my first day, I was in a meeting of a dozen large banks and everyone was supposed to have completed a task so that we could move on. My bank had not completed the task, so I was expecting a lecture from the others in the group.
Maybe two companies had done it. The rest were split between halfway done and "oh, that was for today?"
In my life as a dev, work that runs over just gets shipped in the next sprint. That feature you have needs a tad more work? Move it from sprint 7 to 8.
That hasn’t been my experience with white collar work. Yes, something don’t have to be done now but you’re not the only person working on them, so when you’re late, someone else is too, and so on.
Something can be delayed with prior notice, but that’s a lesson in and of itself.
Only real deadlines so far were for getting demos ready for trade shows. Everything else has been wildly flexible. At least we get to take the time to deliver quality. :)
I remember a physics midterm where more than half the class got an F. (Including me.)
I had a CS class where I got almost double the next highest grade in the class (90 vs 47). To be fair my school had a very mediocre CS program and it was an off semester (I went there because it had a pretty good physics program, but switched majors a couple years in).
> I think that might be the biggest sin with today's school system.
You might not mean it but to me this implies that things were better in the past. You don’t have to go back very far at all to find completely alarming and abusive methods used in schooling. It might have a way to go but it’s also come quite a long way in quite a short time.
My grandfather tells my daughter about going to school and being beaten by the teacher for making mistakes.
The problem with mistakes is that there are at least two kinds of mistakes that happen in school:
1) Mistakes where a student genuinely tries but fails because they didn't quite find the right solution.
2) Mistakes where a student gets it wrong because they put 0 (or even negative) effort into learning or trying to solve the problem.
Mistakes of the first kind should be celebrated, mistakes of the second should be harshly scorned.
Unfortunately, as I remember most of my classmates in school (lower, upper, and especially university) the vast majority of mistakes were made in #2.
I don't know what the school system can do about this. How can you differentiate between the two with the information available to instructors?
You won’t get genuine effort with “harshly scorning” either. If a kid isn’t motivated to learn, punishments and fear aren’t going to solve the problem. They may well make it worse.
That's possibly fair. I honestly don't know much about motivating kids to learn, and I never saw successful examples growing up.
Do you know of any basic theories about it or places I could read more?
My problem is that I remember seeing lots of different attempts to motivate students while I was in school (every teacher had a different approach), and I never saw one that worked at all beyond "If you don't do this I will punish you." (bad grades, principles office, some formal punishment system)
Punishments just make kids (and adults) do the minimum to avoid punishment. They are counter-productive to developing real intrinsic motivation.
Motivation issues probably need to be worked out individually with each kid, which to be fair is not really possible for a teacher with 20 students in their class. But fear and punishments are at best just a band-aid for the problem. At worst, they can ruin a kid’s self-image and cause them to give up on school entirely.
I’m speaking from my own personal experience mainly, and what I saw happen to friends while growing up.
I look at things from a needs-based perspective and from the assumption that, barring conditioning to deny meeting needs or even their existence, living creatures innately seek to meet needs to survive and thrive.
Learning is a need to for both. The body needs to learn how to breathe, digest, poop, etc. Joy is a need for thriving. It also boosts learning.
There's an issue that arises here with common issues around "motivating kids to learn," which is this implies people need to be given some form of incentive to learn, when the truth is the brain is always learning. It may not be learning the content being taught, but it's at least definitely learning from the way the content's being taught. The issue here is that autonomy is a need and modern schooling seems to be focused on dictating to people what to learn. This is a systemic denial of autonomy. As a result, the learning environment is already suboptimal. And if someone already suffers from a chronic denial of autonomy (like, say, in a society that doesn't value empowering children to do what they want and/or in a family that also doesn't, or supports empowerment within a very limited set of constraints, all of which are common situations for most young people in the US), then the system is ensuring learning the curriculum will be severely hindered for those people.
People learn faster when they choose their options. Choosing from an arbitrarily constrained list of subjects isn't the same thing. And chronic need denial harms the learning process, so if you want people to learn what they need to survive and thrive, ask them what they want to learn next and help them learn about that thing and tie the exploration back to needs.
And if you don't know what the mathematically proven universal human needs are, welcome to the dystopia. We currently don't have such a list and I'm hoping category theorists or constructor theorists develop it soon. In the meantime, there are many different lists online promoting different needs. One that's seemingly been forgotten from many of them is the need for memory, so remember to figure out a process for uncovering hidden needs. I choose to follow suffering to see what the underlying needs are there and seeing if the suffering goes away after meeting those needs. If not, there may be a hidden need at play.
I think a lot of it is just about making it fun. Gamification. Story telling. And tying the learning to stuff they are already interested in.
It also helps if the teacher is genuinely passionate about the subject taught. And knows way more than is in the curriculum so he can go on weird tangents and answer curveball questions.
Oh and keeping difficulty just right. Not so easy that it is boring, but not so hard that it makes students despair.
Can you imagine if we lived in a world where we gave young people the room to follow their passions instead of being forced to grind the same repetitive material, stealing the joy of learning from them?
Not every person needs to be good at everything for a society to flourish, or for that person to be successful, healthy, and productive.
Is this held up by historical data? I wouldn’t think so.
In Math, you can tell students to show you how they got the answer to a problem.
I think the bigger problem is that '100%' is often the goal, yet it is far from optimal; get students out of the 'all or nothing' mindset, so they don't become cynical.
In my English schooling system (GCSE and A Levels), if a math question was worth ten points, the correct final answer would be worth exactly one point.
The other nine points were for the steps, and, indeed, were a hint that there were probably ten distinct steps (although usually you could combine several steps and still get full marks so long as it was clear).
Among other things, this also allowed for error-carried-forward: if you made a stupid arithmetic error on step 3, and all your subsequent steps had the wrong values, you would only lose one point, though your final answer was completely wrong.
This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work."
This is the same as my experience growing up in Australia - right the way from primary school up to university-level subjects, mathematics working is marked and you get almost full points if you solve the problem correctly but just make some clerical error somewhere. Even if you can show progress towards a solution but can’t quite get the last bit, you’ll often get 7 or 8 out of 10.
At Caltech you'd get partial credit for getting partway to the correct solution. But, if you got a nonsense result (like negative energy), you'd get negative credit unless you included a note:
I know the answer is absurd, but I don't know where I went wrong.I think this is a good policy, and have often been annoyed that I can’t (rules of the university) mark my students down for such absurd answers.
Negative credit? You mean you lost marks vs not answering the question at all?
Yup. That was institute policy, not the professor's discretion. They were pretty clear about thinking whether the answer was reasonable or not.
> This always amazed the Americans I speak to, for whom it seems there's just a random point or two for "showing your work."
Random point or two? As an American I think it was usually worth most of the points for the math I did...
But this is still aiming for 100%. Being challenged is dangerous to your grade.
I would love to see this approach used in more schools.
Back in the 2000s, a variation on this was used in the US navy's technical schools. Correct answer? Full points, regardless of showing work. Incorrect answer with work shown? Points off for the error, but allowance for errors carried forward. Didn't show work? No points for you!
this reminds me of the error biased marking scheme
get an answer right = +1 point
get an answer wrong = -2 point via subtracting the number of wrong answers from the right answers.
so the plan that was advised is if you are not 100% sure of the answer then dont answer, and you only lose 1 point for not answering
This was also the 80s and 90s approach (at least in Catholic schools when I was a student)
"harshly scorned"
Please don't be a parent.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. Would you please stop that? We ban accounts that do this repeatedly and I don't want to ban you.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29617722 also.
I know you're busy, so I don't expect you to do this, but if you're interested I'd like to talk 1:1 with you.
I kinda agree with you on this one, but I don't agree with you on the thread re: diabetes. Some sentiments are harming people, right now, and not being allowed to call them out seems wrong to do. If this was also about the name of the person, I just picked the name that they had on their HN profile.
Either way. Apologies to you for creating more mod-work-load. I'll keep this in mind and I'd like not to get banned either.
I appreciate the kind reply! There isn't really a tradeoff here, because even when people are so wrong about something that harm could result from believing them, the best way to respond is to patiently provide good arguments and correct information.
If you slip into the flamewar style and/or the online callout-shaming culture, you won't reduce harm. You'll only provoke and reinforce the people who disagree, and the resulting conflagration won't help undecided people decide. Worse, you run the risk of discrediting your own position, and if your position happens to be a correct one, that actually causes harm in its own right, because it somehow ends up discrediting the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
So happily, I would say, the cause of not having flamewars, of sticking to the site guidelines, and of giving the truth the best possible advocacy, more or less coincide. That doesn't make it easy. It's far from easy, but that's because it's hard to handle the emotional torque it places on you when someone else is saying something that is (or that you feel is) totally wrong on a topic. Where by "you" I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us.