"I'm sorry Billy, but you're just less special."

[grey_duck]

Last week I posed the question should we encourage competition between students?

There was a range of thoughts on the matter. Not surprisingly, my fellow educators were advocates of, at the least, finding ways to push students to excel. Pretty much everyone agreed the bell curve sucks, and isn't very practical.

First, a few responses. evilleprechaun pointed

Comments

[the_goatgirl]

I also think that too much collaboration makes the teacher a peer rather than an authority figure, which has its dangers. I don't remember my writing teacher as so much a teacher as a person who had more experience with the subject than me, which worked all right in a writing environment, but meant in a regular english class she couldn't invoke teacher privileges like firm deadlines or boundaries between the personal and the course-related as were needed to make the class work. so what was meant to be a literature class got hostile and all too personal very fast, and lots of people quit going and took an F rather than put up with it. I feel some professional distance needs to be kept for the roles of teacher and student to work, and all collaboration with no competition can destroy that distance to everyone's dismay.

Vis-a-vis this entity, you see?

[evilleprechaun]

Just to clarify what I said earlier, my basic idea is that individual grades get complicated to the point of ridiculous once you start comparing people from different locations (and thus, grading styles) against each other. It's a cop-out answer, but I always use it when people try to argue for changing the system. The education system in America is deeply rooted in itself. This is not a good thing, but it will collapse in on itself if you don't change it enough (basically, you'd have to give it a new system of rules to let it function as it currently does

Good teachers are not inflexible

[grey_duck]

Most of my teachers have not been authoritarians when it comes to grades. For example, if most of the class felt a test question was unfair, or thought a batch of instructions was really miserable, the teacher usually reconsiders and reworks the grades. Also, bear in mind that my rubric as shown above was the vaguest, bare-bones version. An individual assignment would get into a little more detail while still not stating things with complete explicitness

Re: Good teachers are not inflexible

[the_goatgirl]

heh. i think i'm looking forward to the angry parent visits, because i don't get to fight with you. silly anti-confrontational eric.