{"id":2026,"date":"2009-04-23T07:00:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=2026"},"modified":"2009-04-23T07:00:03","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T12:00:03","slug":"failure-is-no-longer-an-option","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2009\/04\/23\/failure-is-no-longer-an-option\/","title":{"rendered":"Failure is no longer an option"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wish I had a lot more time today to write about this subject, because it really fascinates me. There was an article in yesterday’s Citizen <\/em><\/a>about how secondary school students in Ontario are no longer being failed for transgressions as serious as plagarizing. (When I was in university, it seems to me that was grounds for explusion, let alone failing an assignment.) The article notes:<\/p>\n

Teachers are saying they are increasingly pressured to make sure students pass. If a student fails to hand in assignments on time, cheats, plagiarizes or doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show up for tests, they can \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rescue\u00e2\u20ac\u009d their endangered credit. If the student fails, he or she can re-do the assignments they bombed and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153recover\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a wayward credit. Teachers are, as a result, concerned about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153credit integrity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whether a final mark awarded to a student who procrastinates, plagiarizes and bombs tests should be worth the same as the mark awarded to a student who earned a credit by the books the first time around. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This drives me crazy! It’s all linked to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s new and noble drive to increase graduation rates and decrease dropout rates. As the article notes, “While 68 per cent of students graduated from high school within five years in 2003-2004, the province aims to increase the graduation rate to 85 per cent by 2010-2011. Last year, 13,500 more students graduated from Ontario high schools than in the previous year.”<\/p>\n

Well yes, they graduated, but can they write a paragraph? What will they do when they go off to university and have to actually do the work<\/em> to pass, with thousands of dollars of tuition on the line? And what happens when they head out into the real world and they have a boss who isn’t interested in offering “rescue” or “recovery” options the first time they miss a deadline for an important project?<\/p>\n

Call me a hardass on this one, but I think this is yet another way in which we’re coddling kids today and it’s really got to stop! In another article today that I couldn’t immediately find online, Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said, “What we know for now from education research is that failing kids doesn’t motivate [them].” Well, passing them for shoddy work certainly isn’t going to do it, either!<\/p>\n

I feel very strongly about this, in case you didn’t notice, but I also feel like the old fart waving her cane at the passing hooligans from her porch rocker. But seriously, I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be a teacher working in these times. Johnny failed the test because he was playing his Xbox all night instead of studying for the exam, but he’s sorry now and he’d like the chance to recover his credit, so Ms Teacher can you please redesign another test to give Johnny a second chance? Oh, and make sure it’s equally challenging, make special arrangements for a quiet time and place for him to write it, take extra time to mark it, and then help Johnny catch up on all the stuff he missed while he was taking his second test? Oh, he failed again? Oh well. Go ahead and start making up that third test for him.<\/p>\n

I also see this as horrendously unfair to the kids who do try their best and who are going to learn in a righteous hurry that there is absolutely no reason for them to work hard or indeed work at all if the kid sitting next to them committing academic fraud and showing up only when it’s convenient ends up with the same damn diploma at the end of it all.<\/p>\n

Am I reading this wrong? Have I got my knickers in a twist over nothing? (Can’t say that’s ever happened before.) Do you think the province is on the right track by mollycoddling kids through high school?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wish I had a lot more time today to write about this subject, because it really fascinates me. There was an article in yesterday’s Citizen about how secondary school students in Ontario are no longer being failed for transgressions as serious as plagarizing. (When I was in university, it seems to me that was … Continue reading “Failure is no longer an option”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mothering-without-a-licence","category-rants-and-rambles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2027,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions\/2027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}