As I said in my previous post, I wanted to talk about two articles I saw in the Globe and Mail this past weekend. The second article concerns deadlines - or rather a lack of them - in schools these days. Basically, the idea is that students can no longer be penalized for handing in assignments late - if they turn them in at all.
This is a tough issue to tackle. On one hand, students need to be held accountable for their learning. Though I am unaware of a similar rule in B.C., I've been in many classrooms here where it feels like pulling teeth to get assignments in from students (though admittedly, that could be due to my relative inexperience). I find it hard to justify passing a student who hands in a quarter of the work they are supposed to do. What values are we teaching children by allowing them to "do what they can?"
That being said, since we do push students faster than their abilities, it is much harder for some students to do all the work in the given time. Should we be asking students to do more than they are able to do? What about home situations? Some students have help at home, while others have other things on their minds at home (and I don't mean XBOX).
Like the last post, it seems like the system does not offer any satisfying solution to this situation. We can either teach children about deadlines (the fact that we have deadlines in the first place could be debated - why does a paper about World War II (or whatever topic you choose) have to be finished by Friday? The war is not going anywhere), or we can frustrate many of them by giving them too much.
I find it interesting that the article briefly mentions rubrics, and in a way, dismisses them. Without getting into a big debate about marks and the difference between a 79 and an 80% I will say that I think that rubrics are fairer to students and a better measure of their progress.
So in closing, I have a lot more issues to look into in the future, including: Marks, Deadlines, and the segregation of students in Gifted programs (or otherwise).
I hope this didn't confuse you too much. I think the purpose of me writing this is to expose the issues facing our schools today (of which I saw many the last few months).
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My first thought is that deadlines may not be about what a kid can do, but rather about what a kid will do. It's the gifted perspective coming back, but I didn't hand in assignments on time because I couldn't, rather, because I didn't want to. It seemed to me that procrastination was seen as an acceptable hallmark of being gifted.
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