Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

[wiredrock]

One thing that has been driving me crazy about Dancer is the way, or rather lack of studying she does for her school work. Despite this she comes up with a mix of A’s and B’s. Not bad, but if she put that little extra effort in she could pull straight A’s.  Also what does not help is the grading scale for Fairfax County. A’s begin at the 94%

Comments

[greta_k]

FFCty penalizes the students just to message the egos of the county administrators. They aren't doing the kids any favors. If you need to publish guidelines to explain your grading system to colleges/universities around the country, you are doing something WRONG, not right.

I also feel that honors/AP classes should be weighted more than a regular class. If you are smart enough and work hard enough to get into a class at that level than by God you should get a little something for it.

I went through a public school system which was at LEAST as challenging, if not MORE challenging than Fairfax County. We sent lots of kids to top public and private schools, not just because the (some, not all) parents could afford it, but because the kids were that well educated. We had a 91-100 = A system, with honors/AP courses weighted in high school. It didn't do me or my sibs any harm, and it wouldn't do Small Person any harm either.

[greta_k]

Excuse me, massage the egos of the county administrators. See - they annoy me so much that I confuse "message" and "massage." ;-)

[wiredrock]

It has been surprising that the County has not realized what effect these “little” things can have on their students future and ability to compete with others in getting into schools, much less scholarships. There are many boneheaded things the county has done in the past several years that have had most of the parents upset. One right now it the building of a new School Board building that they don’t need in a time when they are facing a budget short fall. Right now they are going so far as to having parents go to the school websites to read/download documents to save from buying paper. Not a bad thing, but the schools are looking to save money everywhere they can right now.

[greta_k]

The conserving of paper could also be part of a general Green initiative which many associations and organizations are doing. I'm going to a Virginia AIA conference next week, and rather than print handouts and give out bags, they are directing participants to their website to download the pertinient information, and asking us to bring our own reuseable bags (which I'm fine with, as I have loads of canvas bags at home).

The new school board building, while definitely ill-timed, is probably being paid for (mostly) by money which was ear-marked @3-5 years ago. There is a several year lapse between when a building is designed (including education buildings - I worked on plenty of those over the last 10 years), the land aquired, the project goes to bid and the building is built.

However, the Board is still bone-headed to not see how reconfiguring the grade scale adversely affects many students. They just want to make themselves look good.

[jurgenzuvols]

Yeah, I think she deserves recognition too. I don't think I ever got straight A. All As and One B+ is worth some nice treatment.