Basic compliance is necessary for what? Here you are, claiming that the goal of school is not to produce compliant people, yet you claim that compliance is "absolutely necessary" in a school. You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to work through, because at some point you might be able to teach. How about just skipping the things that you admit are pointless, and just teaching?
"the average student"
If you are willing to acknowledge that some students are different from others, that some students have different needs than others, why not grade talented students differently? If you have a student who has clearly mastered the material of the course, to the point where your assignments and lectures are just wasting their time, why not give them an A and then teach them more interesting / advanced material? Why demand that students who are not in need of your instruction be just as obedient as those who would be lost without you?
Basic compliance is absolutely necessary in any working environment. It sounds like you're advocating anarchy as a viable education model.
"You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to work through."
I am absolutely not saying that. I had hoped your reading comprehension was better than that.
I said: "asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it utterly lacks value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights." I stand by this statement. Note that I am not in any way advocating time-wasting assignments.
Time-wasting assigments may indicate a poor teacher. However, refusing to do them and/or skipping class is more a reflection on the student than the system.
Regarding your final paragraph: there are a LOT of assumptions there based on how you think I run my classroom. You have assumed incorrectly at almost point. I do literally everything you suggest in my classroom.
Edit: here's evidence of that from a couple of years ago [1]
Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your class; those were more rhetorical questions than anything. On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be saying, when your own teaching style seems to be based on trying not to waste students' time. Nor am I sure how you can reconcile the idea that time-wasting assignments indicate a poor teacher with the notion that students should be completing those assignments.
Now, as for my reading comprehension, the way I read what you wrote is this: students should do as they are told because compliance is necessary for a school to function, even if they are told to work through a time-wasting assignment. I am still not sure that is the wrong way to interpret what you are saying. What I see in your comments is the idea that it should be entirely the teachers' responsibility to ensure that students are learning, and that students should just do what their teachers command regardless of whether or not they actually learn anything from it (feel free to correct me if this is not your view). Thus a student who does not bother with pointless exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in lieu of doing their official assignments.
For what it's worth, if I had you as a teacher back in high school, I probably would have done well, at least based on what you said elsewhere.
"Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your class."
Except for when you said I "approach school like prison." :)
"On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be saying."
In my opinion, a student who doesn't complete a time-wasting assignment ought to expect to receive a grade of zero on that assignment. I think either fewer or more consequences would miss the mark. I'm not sure if you would consider this "punishment"; I would not.
I think we're missing each other because we're using the same words but with different definitions.
I don't consider failing to complete a worksheet (time-wasting or otherwise) to be a matter of compliance. Notice that in my original comment I used the word "insubordination", which is important.
(I do think that there's a place for requiring a specific method. When I give my kids programming assignments, I sometimes restrict how they're allowed to complete the program. If I say "You must use a while loop", and the kids uses a for loop, there's no credit, even if a for loop would be better. I gave you this assignment because I want to MAKE SURE you can solve it using a while loop. Sometimes my curriculum requires me to make sure you can solve the equation using "completing the square" even when other techniques might work just as well. I think I'm justified in not giving points if you don't complete the square.)
I'll use a different example: in my school, hats are prohibited by dress code. (This is a dumb rule.) If I am walking through the halls and see a student wearing a hat, I ask him to remove it. If he removes it, we are good. He has "complied" with my perfectly legitimate request. If he refuses to remove it, we have a problem. He is insubordinate, aka "non-compliant".
I maintain that this sort of compliance is ABSOLUTELY necessary. I don't make very many outright demands of my students ("Johnny, I need you to sit down.") but when I do they damn well better comply.
Now, as I've said, I much prefer to let natural consequences rule the day. But some students want to break rules and then ALSO avoid the consequences of those rules, and that's what I object to. It's like, you understand that Rosa Parks was arrested, right? She didn't just refuse to move to the back of the bus; she also gracefully accepted that she was going to get arrested for it, too. And that's why civil disobedience works.
In the case of a "completing the square" worksheet, I think it's justified to not award points for getting the correct answer if the method wasn't what was specified. If my curriculum prescribes that "students must demonstrate mastery of solving equations using completing the square" (which would be a bad curriculum, agreed) and you refuse to demonstrate that you can do that, then I can't in good conscience award you points. And if you're a dick about it, then we may have an insubordination issue on top of it.
So it's not as simple as just ensuring students are learning. Sometimes we're required to make sure they can get their answers in a specific way.
To give a real example from my classes: I think object-oriented programming is WAY overrated. But I have to teach it. When I do so, I apologize to the kids for making them do it, because OOP doesn't make sense for the small programs they're using it on. Using OOP for a 50-line program is almost always BAD design.
But when I ask kids to write Tic-Tac-Toe in an object-oriented way, and they turn in a perfect but non-OO solution, they get zero points. And if they try to argue with me about it, then we're getting into disrespect territory.
I suspect that this is what happened to you. You got into a lot of power struggles with teachers. (Those teachers were probably also bad teachers, which is only partly related.) Then you got tired of fighting about it and just started skipping class. But you didn't hate the curriculum, just the methodology.
So, to deconstruct: "Thus a student who does not bother with pointless exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in lieu of doing their official assignments."
A teacher who gives exercises with no educational value is the most wrong.
(Important caveat: you probably are not a perfect judge of which exercises have educational value, because 1) you had a bad experience, 2) some of your teachers were bad and treated you badly, so even if the assignments were okay in and of themselves, they were received badly, and 3) you didn't do some of them anyway. Like, who knew that eating kale could improve your eyesight? You'll never know if you don't eat it.)
A student who cares about learning is better than one who doesn't, even if one does assignments and the other doesn't.
A student who doesn't care about learning but completes assignments anyway is probably slightly more likely to succeed than a student who DOES care about learning but refuses to do classwork. This is a shame, but statistically true.
Always remember that Rosa Parks would never have accomplished anything if she had run from the cops.
And finally, for what it's worth, I have the following sign posted in my classroom:
The Best Students in my Class
* Ask questions until they understand deeply
* Want knowledge more than grades
* Accept consequences gracefully for their choices
* Don't quit (They have grit.)
You're grossly overestimating the capacity of any public school system in this country. You're talking about people who are underpaid, who face being laid off on a yearly basis, and who have too many pupils in their classrooms. What you're asking for -- a system that recognize's each individual's capacity and inclination and tailors the learning experience accordingly -- is a joke. Given the constraints, the only thing you can hope for is to try to present a curriculum which will be as effective as possible across as many students as possible.
Students of the type you're talking about would best be served by being home schooled or attending private school. I realize that doesn't work for many families. What's your suggestion? You get what you pay for.
Students of the type you're talking about would best be served by being home schooled or attending private school. I realize that doesn't work for many families. What's your suggestion?
Universal, portable public education vouchers, payable to any educational institution the parents select. (A portion of the standard voucher could be payable to the parents themselves if they wish to homeschool and can maintain a satisfactory inspection record. I wouldn't complain if such an inspection regime were very strict: it's public money.)
Some public schools would close overnight; they would literally empty the instant that their customers had any choice at all. Others would struggle for a few years before either closing or improving. Other public schools would have to add staff and buildings. Some private schools might grow more selective. Other private schools might just grow. We'd also see online providers expand and innovate, which will be good news for those who spent high school in their own lockers.
The top-down thing hasn't worked, and even TFA agrees with that. It's time for the people at the bottom, the customers, to have a choice.
Basic compliance is necessary for what? Here you are, claiming that the goal of school is not to produce compliant people, yet you claim that compliance is "absolutely necessary" in a school. You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to work through, because at some point you might be able to teach. How about just skipping the things that you admit are pointless, and just teaching?
"the average student"
If you are willing to acknowledge that some students are different from others, that some students have different needs than others, why not grade talented students differently? If you have a student who has clearly mastered the material of the course, to the point where your assignments and lectures are just wasting their time, why not give them an A and then teach them more interesting / advanced material? Why demand that students who are not in need of your instruction be just as obedient as those who would be lost without you?