Don't worry about the sentence-level details. In conference, we'll talk about the big stuff -- argument and evidence.
Feel free to read each other's drafts. They just might give you an argument or two to respond to.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Receiving a bad grade always has made my heart sink with fear. My fear of my father has been balanced however, with him paying me off for good grades. With fear and money as a motivator for me, I have always worked hard for a good grade. While Singleton ignores the fact that failing grades could be bad for kids in many ways, giving kids that deserve failing grades would better show what is wrong with our education system, and what children really need to be learning in school.
ReplyDeleteFor parents that do care about their children’s grades, if their kids came home with a poor grade in a subject, they would certainly make their kids do something about it and learn the material. If not parents, but a guardian or brother or sister, or even a teacher should be giving these kids assistance, and motivation to do work. That mentor or parent especially needs to show kids the importance of learning the material and the positive impact it will have on the rest of their life. This should be stressed to students in school and at home.
Teachers are responsible for what children learn. This means if kids are failing because they do not know the material, then maybe the teacher needs to be teaching better. Now that there have been studies to show how kids learn, all teachers should be aware of this and arrange the way they teach to fit their student’s needs. Teachers spend valuable time with children, especially when the kids are younger. This is when kids need to be encouraged to do well and showing kids that school is fun or important, and make sure that they learn how to read, basic math, and social skills. Social skills are important because if kids have friends they might be less likely to drop out, or have something to look forward to if their home life is bad, and they do not like school.
If more and more kids start flunking out, maybe the government would notice and put more money into education. This would help make education more than just grades, but being a leader, and a well-rounded person. Not every kid is good at everything, which is why schools need to need to be diverse in what they teach, to give kids free range to everything- from music to sports, math to languages. Administrators need to show the rest of the country that currently, we can’t keep kids back to learn the material because teachers are overworked, there isn’t enough money, and most administrators would rather get the kids out instead of teach them because they are tired of giving the same kids detention over and over again.
Students also have the largest responsibility. They are the ones that need to learn the material, and should make themselves curious about education. While giving F’s will not make every kid motivated, there has to be something that spark your curiosity and give way to enjoying your education. Students also need to know that they will not be good at everything. Nor is education supposed to be easy or interesting all the time. Sometimes the boring stuff has to be taught, because there are certain standards for education and for a successful life.
Carl Singleton believes the education system is failing and needs reformation. In his piece “What Our Education System Needs is More F’s,” he states exactly that. Singleton believes giving out F’s to students who are slacking on their schoolwork will help motivate them to try harder and earn better grades. Assuming this strategy is successful in helping students earn higher grades, it will then improve the American grading system that “continues to deteriorate.” Singleton also believes parents will become more involved in their students’ education if they begin to fail. However, teachers and the administration are affected as well, as cost would be a factor in spending more money on accommodating students that are held back a year. In Singleton’s arguments, he creates assumptions that grades and fear of failure are enough motivation for any student; however, not all students will positively respond to receiving an F.
ReplyDeleteWhile receiving a big red, circled F on a paper or test may instill fear of failure in some students; the majority will blow it off because they are most likely unmotivated anyways. Singleton states that “only students who haven’t learned the material” should be given F’s, but are those the type of students that are putting in effort or care about their schoolwork? In most cases, students that earn bad grades do not care about school and brush it off so receiving an F instead of a C or D will not make a difference to them. Rather, if the unmotivated students continue to get F’s, they will drop out of school, which will only lead to more serous problems such as using drugs or alcohol.
Many parents also play an important role in their childrens’ education. However, what about the parents that don’t push their children to do better in school? Or the students who are not afraid of the consequences their parents may give when they receive a bad grade? Those students that are not motivated by themselves or their parents will not take receiving an F in a positive way. Students that are not doing well in school are not being pushed by their parents. My parents have always encouraged me to do well and instilled consequences when I performed poorly. I understood the consequences and by high school, I learned to hold myself to higher expectations without the help of my parents. However, I have watched many of my classmates fail out of school because their parents did not encourage them to succeed and therefore, they did not care either.
If teachers are holding more students back from continuing to the next grade rather than learning the material, who says they will not drop out before then? No student wants to leave their friends who are entering high school while they are stuck with the immature upcoming eighth graders for an entire year. Middle school is tough enough for any student but factoring in the teasing and bullying associated with being the “kid that stayed back” is enough for any student to give up and drop out of school. Forcing students to learn the material will only frustrate rather than help them. Also, many teachers are already overwhelmed with their classes but having to monitor and make sure an unmotivated student learns the material is a large task on its own.
Is having all college freshmen being able to read a positive thing? Singleton implies that all college freshmen will be able to read because those that can’t will not be admitted anywhere and the drop-out rate will increase.
Singleton’s argument is poor because he does not consider the many disadvantages to his arguments. There are more negative aspects that accompany giving students F’s than positive ones.
-Molly
ReplyDelete“The immediate need for our educational system… is not more money or better teaching, but simply a widespread giving of F’s.” Carl Singleton, author of “What our Education System Needs is More F’s,” argues that this would solve the problems facing the American educational system. However, he fails to address the additional problems and consequences that this “solution” would lead to. Additionally, he bases his argument on the concept of fear as a motivator, without considering the negative effects. Failing millions of students would not solve the problems facing our educational system; instead, it would only further complicate the situation.
ReplyDeleteMore problems will be caused by greatly increasing the number of failing grades. It will lead to: major influx of dropouts into society. This could lead to more crime, many more homeless people. It is hard enough to get a job with a high school diploma, and near impossible to get one without. This would lead to the unemployment rate, civil unrest, and overall hurt society.
Singleton relies primarily on the notion of fear being an effective motivator. While it is certainly one of the simplest ways to motivate, it is not always effective. There are two types of student: the ones who work hard to get the grades, and those who could care less what letter grade they get and are far more concerned with getting out of school. Obviously, those who care about there grades would be motivated by a failing grade, unfortunately, these are also most likely the students that aren’t in the position to fail in the first place. As for the students that don’t care, a failing grade would likely lead to them becoming even more apathetic, and likely giving up and dropping out.
Is fear as a motivator worth the consequences? It would likely harm the students relationship with not only education and his or her teacher, but often his or her relationship with their parents. I took piano lessons for five years, and hated every moment of it, and not because I hate the instrument. I still play piano today, and I’m not fantastic, but I do enjoy it, but, I was scared of my teacher, and ultimately, I quit. I never felt that she was satisfied with my ability, and granted I didn’t practice as much as I should have. However, I sincerely believe that if I would have had a teacher that I felt believed in me and didn’t tell me she was “uninspired by my work,” I may have kept taking lessons for five more years. But, the fact that my teacher intimidated me caused me to resent her, and resent playing, even though I did enjoy and was competent.
Failing grades would likely have the opposite effect of motivating and would actually act as a distraction. If a student is failing one class, then they could be distracted from the classes that they are doing well in, and end up failing even more classes.
ReplyDeleteSingleton believes that failing more students would cause teachers to strive for excellence. This is fantasy, because again, while failure can sometimes act as a motivator, teacher’s salaries aren’t high enough to motivate them double the amount of time they put in with student’s that may not care in the first place. Additionally, a failing environment is something that no one should work towards because the student’s would likely resent the teacher, possibly even putting them in danger.
Another implication of Singleton’s argument, is that a failing child would cause parents to care. Unfortunately, this is also not an easy assumption to make because many parents aren’t going to care if their student is failing. It may cause them to kick the child out of the home, or threaten the administration, but it isn’t going to make them sit down with their child every night to do homework.
I come from a family of teachers, my mother was a teacher for thirty years and my brother was just certified this past winter. My mom was a family consumer education teacher and I remember her telling me, “You can’t force somebody to have ambition.” Singleton fails to consider this, and he fails to note that some people’s talents lay outside of adding integers or memorizing war dates. If he wants so desperately to fix the education system, then perhaps we should offer more options to students. Maybe we should offer more practical classes, but simply failing a student because he or she doesn’t understand sentence structure doesn’t make sense. Standardized testing is another culprit for the issues facing our educational system. It is no wonder that many students don’t learn how to write a paper when they are simply learning test taking techniques.
Paige
In his essay, What the Education System Needs is More F’s, Singleton illustrates his solution for beginning to solve most problems in the education system. As the title would suggest Singleton wants more A’s to be distributed to students who do not learn the required material for a class. It is very debatable whether this would have a positive or negative impact on children. Proponents of Singleton’s plan may think that this will call attention to failing students so that they can be saved before they pass high school an illiterate. Someone who is against Singleton’s plan would say that this would create a surplus of people who do not have high school degrees. I have to however, side with Singleton on this argument. There are very real occupational and psychological issues with giving a student an un earned passing grade.
ReplyDeleteThe occupational issues are not immediately obvious. Many would say that the students are better off if they are able to at least pass, getting a high school, or college degree, even if they do not know all of the material. It helps them to get better jobs. However, once they do have a degree, employers will expect them to have the minimal knowledge required to get that degree, knowledge that the person does not have. The education system passing this student seems like passing the problem on to society. They failed to educate him as a student and now he has the degree but not the education to go with it. Consequences of this would be this particular student getting a job they are not qualified for, which would cause a negative influence to the employer, as well as the student who may get fired from that job. These are not the only negative consequences of the unearned passing grade.
There are psychological issues with giving students grades they do not deserve are also a very existent problem. In the earlier stages of mental development, children base their moral and work ethic based entirely off of punishment and reward. This is especially true of in grade school. They will get the idea that they can succeed and get by without completing the full amount of work. This may continue on into their adult lives, where they will think they deserve the rewards without having to put up the effort, creating a population of frankly lazy individuals, who will not be able to survive in the competitive work world. We are essentially not properly preparing these students for a life in the labor market and setting them up for future failure.
ReplyDeleteIn an article written by Carl Singleton, titled What Our Education System Needs is More F’s, he argues that an immediate solution to our many educational flaws is to call for teachers to assess students with more failing grades when deserved. Carl argues that this change in assessment will more effectively target students who do not deserve a better grade, or to move on to the next educational level. For example, Carl points out the number of legitimately illiterate high school graduates grows annually, something that would change if more students were to fail their courses. Another argument of his is that with failing grades, student’s families and friends will be forced to be more actively involved in the learning process. Making a change as big as this in the classroom would have a demoralizing effect on students across the country, and would change the learning environment altogether. One goal of education is to instill a love of learning in students, which would be taken away in an environment polluted by the fear of failing. This added pressure to succeed would certainly effect many to do better in the classroom, as Singleton points out, but it would also equally effect many to want to drop out or not try harder. I think that indeed the number of illiterate graduates would go down but at the same time the drop out rate or number of students being held back would skyrocket.
ReplyDeleteA better solution to the problem may be to focus on this love for learning aspect, rather than instilling a fear of failing. Personally I grew up with consequences for poor grades in school, which helped me to avoid lazy habits which I knew would hurt me in the long run. While reminding me of the consequences of failing though, my parents also helped me to love certain aspects of learning, such as reading and problem solving. Singleton makes a strong point in that failing more students would solve many problems our country faces with inadequacy of education, but it would also negatively effect the traditional learning environment and would hurt our system in multiple ways.
Once again, I cannot paste anything into this field. So I have to summarize my paper. I basically argue that Rauch is correct, for the most part, with the exception of honors and AP students, though not all of them are exceptions. I also argue that Rauch is correct in saying that more homework would lead to more achievement, assuming the homework was not increased across the board, but handled on a class-specific basis.I point out the different effects based on different groups of students, too. I also agree that many students in the US are lazy, but that doesn't mean we're all lazy.
ReplyDeleteforgot to post on here!
ReplyDeleteMany students are active with their school during their high school years. I was involved in many different clubs and sports as well. Some days it was a struggle to keep up with the homework load on top of all these activities, especially while taking upper level courses. These days consisted of long practices, long days, and even longer nights. Now Jonathan Rauch wishes to add more homework? Is he crazy? Adding more homework will not drastically improve the achievement of students and will create problems in the educator’s life. In fact, by doing adding more homework, students will lose many important life lessons along the way; those of which are just as important as education.
Colleges and universities are stressing students to be actively involved in their community, to become a better well-rounded educated student. Now Rauch wants to punish active students by adding more stress to their lives? Acceptance to a prestige university is high achievement. Extracurricular activities are important in the goal towards this acceptance. Some feel extracurricular activities are not important; they do not contribute to a child’s education, so cut them and add more homework. Extracurricular activities teach students other aspects of life, away from the academics. They teach them how to be a leader and a teammate (as captain of the softball team) as well as real life skills with communicating with others and being active. I was actively involved in my school, graduated with above a 4.0, and was accepted to a respected university. If that is not high achievement, Rauch’s view is not rational.
Rauch believes it would be easy to add more homework, to just give extra assignments. In reality, he is not thinking of how this would affect the teachers. Each teacher would have to think of more assignments and have more to grade. This means later nights to grade assignments and a lack of sleep, which can in turn affect the quality of their grading. Also, teachers may become overwhelmed and overworked. Recreation outside of the workplace is a necessity, especially when working hard, and teachers would loose that. This may lead to teachers quitting and finding something else to do with their lives. More teachers would have to be hired in both cases, to keep up with the load of homework. Is this feasible to do? Jobs are scarce right now and in this economy, employers cannot afford to hire in new help. Again, Rauch is not being rational.
Some arguments say what if only twenty extra minutes per subject is added onto the regular homework load? Like Rauch, they believe this is easy to do and will make a drastic difference. When a student is taking 5 core classes on top of electives, those extra twenty minutes can add up to over an extra two hours of homework a night. There is not enough time to finish assignments after getting home late at night. When I was on the tennis team, I would get home from an away match at about ten at night. I would then have loads of homework and studying to do anyway that kept me up till at least midnight. If I had extra homework, I would be up until two in the morning and be expected to still get up at six in the morning to get ready for another long day. Imagine that, with matches 3-4 times a week. Impossible. Rauch states, “American students are lazy.” Laziness is not the reason not to add more homework. In reality, health and other life lessons are just as important as the academic side to learning.
ReplyDeleteRauch does not think about how extra homework will affect the lives of students, teachers, and families. Teachers will no longer have lives outside of school and will become overworked and frustrated. Families will be spending less time together. Added stress would be a factor to all and the kids would be spending less time being kids. Extra homework will not improve a student’s achievement level drastically; that student has to be motivated to improve as well and can do so without the unnecessary extra homework load. Adding more homework will have negative effects and will take away from the other great aspects of life itself.
Our country’s education system seems to be suffering. How does a country as strong and wealthy as ours have problems with teaching our students? Are the students or the teachers to blame? In “Now, for Tonight’s Assignment,” Jonathan Rauch seems to think that the students are to blame, and that they need more homework in order to learn. He doesn’t think of the negative consequences of what this action would cause. More homework would cause added stress to students and teachers, would not allow time for extracurricular activities, and may lead to more drop outs and failures within schools.
ReplyDeleteRauch thinks that our education system in America is suffering because students are not learning since they don’t get enough homework. He thinks that to solve this lack of intelligence in schools teachers should assign homework every night. He thinks that more homework will give the students more sense of achievement since they will get higher grades. Students are not going to want homework every night, and I am sure that they will not complete a lot of their assignments since they will have no personal time outside of school work. Not completing their assignments definitely won’t help raise their grades. Rauch also makes his point that students are just lazy and that’s another reason why the school system is so bad. Are the students really lazy or do they just like to go and do things other than homework all the time? He says they are lazy because most students in high schools and middle schools only did the bare minimum to get by. This doesn’t make them lazy; how does he know that they are not already swamped with work from just the minimum amount of classes.
Implementing more homework is going to add stress to student and teacher life. Students being swamped with homework are not going to be able to do anything besides school work. They will not be able to live and be a kid. They will have to focus strictly on their work and grades. On nice days they won’t be able to just relax with friends, instead they will be stressing out because they need to study and get some assignment done that is due the next morning. However, more homework also affects the teachers. The teachers will become really stressed out. They will have way more work than they will be able to handle. If the teacher has say 20 people a class and assigns homework every night and has say 7 classes a day; that is 140 assignments to grade a night. That is a ton of papers to grade.
The teachers would not only have to grade the papers but also come up with assignments and materials to teach for the next day in class. During my high school days, a lot of my teachers would not give out a lot of homework just for the fact that they didn’t want to grade 20 assignments for a single class as well as all their other classes. Implementing more homework will not allow teachers to have a life outside of their career. Constantly grading papers, making up tests, and anything else school related will take away from time from their families. If they have problems at home those problems will eventually affect how they work. They won’t be able to perform to the best of their abilities because of lack of sleep from being up all night grading, and extremely stressed because their family does not get to see them much and are complaining about it. This will definitely affect the way the students learn. These factors are why the education system is the way it is. Rauch needs to understand that it is not just the students, but it is also the teachers that are messing up the learning process also.
ReplyDeleteAlong with the fact that students will not have a life outside of school, the extracurricular activities will no longer exist at schools. No sports, plays, or clubs; students won’t be able to learn values that they can’t learn in the classroom. One essential value that students can learn during these extracurricular sports is teamwork. Teamwork allows them to be able to work with others to get a task done. During my high school years, I played varsity football. It was here that I learned the value of teamwork the most. When I was a sophomore playing varsity football, I was forced to play with guys that I didn’t know that well. Although I knew no one, I learned to accept the challenge of working with older guys I didn’t know too well. Teamwork also showed me how to encourage those around me when they were feeling down. For example, my friend Kyle was a good receiver but for some reason he was just having a bad day. The coach was riding him all day about dropping the ball and I realized that this was making Kyle feel down, so I gave him some words of inspiration since we all knew that he could catch and next thing we knew he was catching every ball thrown his way.
Rauch claims that students are just flat out lazy. I disagree because students aren’t doing their homework because they are outside running around, making friends, and having fun. They are far from lazy, and maybe if homework wasn’t so boring then students might want to interact with their homework assignments.
Assignments are just too dull and boring. The dullness makes students not want to complete the homework, therefore making them get bad grades. These bad grades, may cause more students to drop out, because they feel that school is just not for them or maybe they just can’t get the grades to graduate. The more drop outs will eventually affect the economy in the future. That will be more people needing to live off of welfare or unemployment, because jobs are already hard enough to get and with hundreds of thousands of more people looking for those same jobs as us now when we will never be able to employ everyone. Not only would the schools have more drop outs, but they will probably kick more students out because they keep failing. All this extra homework may just be too much for the student to be able to focus in every class. Say a student has 7 classes a day and he or she gets an assignment everyday in each class. He or she must complete 35 assignments a week and that does not include time for them to study for upcoming test and quizzes. That again also doesn’t include things that go on in the student’s home life such as helping his family out or maybe working a job to pay for some bills.
ReplyDeleteIf Rauch found a way to actually implement his homework idea; I think he would further hurt our education system. Yes, there may be things wrong the system but nothing will ever be perfect. More homework is just going to cause too many problems for the students to be able to focus on other things than school, and it will also stress the teachers out way to much just to grade all those assignments. Education is a very important thing, but just like everything else it is bad when you let it rule your life and you don’t get to go out and experience new and fun things.
Carl Singleton, author of What Our Education System Needs is More F’s, and faculty member at Fort Hays State University, wrote an essay describing why teachers giving more F’s through high school would improve education. He feels that teachers are too easy on students, in many cases, and that students who haven’t learned the “required material” should be failed. Singleton points out that many students that pass out of high school and move into colleges and universities are illiterate. He argues that teachers are low quality, and many shouldn’t have obtained their teaching degree. Singleton feels that many teachers hand out D’s where an F should have been given to avoid failing students who deserve it. He declares that if more teachers were willing to fail students that weren’t up to par, their parents, principals, the school boards, and voters would all be willing to take more action in trying to motivate kids. Singleton feels that there needs to be a higher standard of teaching methods and higher expectations in order to save education.
ReplyDeleteSingleton most likely feels this way because he is a university faculty member at a state university and may have to deal with these kinds of students every day. It has to be extremely frustrating to have to deal with students who aren’t up to par, and weren’t prepared for college by their high schools. Getting all illiterate students out of colleges and universities would save him and many other faculty members a much easier time. If standards were raised in high schools, and students were required to completely understand the material before passing, it would also save the faculty members from having to go back and go over things that had been covered in high school.
High school standards may not be adequate to what colleges want from potential students, but in this time and date, colleges have many more requirements that have to be met before one can be admitted. Most colleges and universities require students to take the ACT’s or SAT’s and obtain a certain score before even looking at their applications. In order to take these tests, one must be alliterate and be able to connect things from reading and past knowledge. Some states, such as Ohio, have required graduation tests that also stop teachers from just passing kids on from one grade to the next.
As for motivating students to work harder, my school did a fairly good job.
ReplyDeleteWesterville South allowed sophomore students that passed their OGT’s (Ohio Graduation Test) in the upper two categories to be exempt from their finals in the core subjects that they passed. The test had to be passed the first time taking the test, and the student also had to be passing the core subject. Westerville South also motivated high school seniors by allowing finals to be exempt again if they received a C or higher on their midterm exam and if they had an average of a 4.0 in the class the second semester. Westerville South High School is a public school that does bus in students from inner city Columbus. Honors, AP, and IB teachers are not afraid to kick kids out who aren’t doing their work. They have set standards and aren’t willing to put up with laziness. I didn’t take too many “regular” classes in high school, but even the few that I did weren’t willing to just hand out passing grades. For example, in my health class, sophomore year, only about three students in our class of twenty-five had A’s. About five had B’s, and the majority of the rest of the class had F’s. This was also many of the student’s second or third time taking heath at my high school. It amazed me that they didn’t seem to care. It was a required class to graduate, and yet the majority of the class seemed unaffected. I personally think that my high school did an excellent job providing options to those of us that wanted to be there and wanted to learn. The option of honors, AP, and IB classes provided a great opportunity to those of us willing to take a slightly more challenging classes and not be interrupted by those who didn’t care, and those who as singleton deserved an F.
So while maybe handing out more F’s would be a good thing, I don’t feel like it would really solve the education problem at all. With No Child Left Behind, the schools have to try and provide an education for all, and try to make sure that all can graduate. Colleges and universities also now have the privilege of being more selective of incoming students. Most public facilities can decide who makes it to the main campus and who doesn’t. This provides a means for a student to see if they can prevail and succeed in college before the university allows them to transfer to main campus.