bharvey wrote:

scratchmouse wrote:

Today I stumbled upon this blog, written by a math teacher

I got caught up in the one about cheating. He gets so close to saying we shouldn't give grades, but doesn't quite get there.

So… should we?

(I'm pretty sure I know your answer, but am curious to hear your reasoning.)

PullJosh wrote:

bharvey wrote:

scratchmouse wrote:

Today I stumbled upon this blog, written by a math teacher

I got caught up in the one about cheating. He gets so close to saying we shouldn't give grades, but doesn't quite get there.

So… should we?

(I'm pretty sure I know your answer, but am curious to hear your reasoning.)

Of course not!

Tl;dw: Intrinsic motivation is better.

Also, dealing with grades is a major pain and truly terrible use of time.

cycomachead wrote:

Intrinsic motivation is better.

Absolutely. However, I'd like to play the devil's advocate for a moment. Are all students intrinsically motivated to learn everything? And if not, is that okay? Is having an extrinsic motivation any better than having no motivation at all?

cycomachead wrote:

Also, dealing with grades is a major pain and truly terrible use of time.

Now this I can definitely get behind.

Personally, I tend to view grades the same way I view photographs: It's okay to take pictures, as long as it doesn't interfere with what you're taking a picture of. (I get annoyed when people interrupt a fun event to take a posed photo. ) In the same way, I would be fine with giving grades, but never at the expense of real learning. Not sure if that's possible.

PullJosh wrote:

However, I'd like to play the devil's advocate for a moment. Are all students intrinsically motivated to learn everything? And if not, is that okay? Is having an extrinsic motivation any better than having no motivation at all?

Motivation: not my department, except that as a teacher I shouldn't ruin whatever motivation they have.

What's my department is encouraging risk-taking. The risk of asking what might seem like “stupid” questions. The risk of trying something and having it not work. The risk that someone in the room might know more than you do. (Or be “smarter.”) You can't learn anything unless you're willing to take risks.

Hence, it follows that nobody can learn anything in an environment that involves grades.

(Certification of competence: Also not my department. The right model for this is learning to drive. I go to driving school and pay someone to teach me. That instructor is on my side! If they say I'm ready for the road test and then I fail it, they give me extra lessons for free until I do pass it. Making sure I pass is their job. Meanwhile, someone else, the government, pays someone else to certify my competence. That person is not on my side. I can ask my instructor stupid questions, but not the examiner.)

And, that whole question about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation is wrongly posed. It's not the case that a student has a certain amount of motivation and we just have to work with/around that. Imposing extrinsic motivation destroys intrinsic motivation, even when discounting the part about making the student afraid.

So when I was a high school CS teacher back in the early ‘80s, the first thing I did was talk the school into letting me not give grades. (This was before computers took over the world; I don’t think I could persuade them today, because CS is now Important.) It was great. Kids would come and go at all hours, and once in a while some kid would ask me to teach him something (sadly, it was almost always “him” in those days), or I'd look over a kid's shoulder and make suggestions, gently for newbies and not so gently for old friends. Some of those kids, now age 50ish, are still among my closest friends.

I did plan out a more structured starting experience for kids, so they had specific things to learn in their first semester with me. But still without grades! And I designed my course to be variable-credit, so a kid who didn't know anything about programming and signed up out of curiosity, then decided s/he wasn't that interested, could do the minimum required work and get one credit of Pass instead of two credits of Fail. (No points for success, just for trying.) So I guess that's a little bit of extrinsic motivation, but just to get you to show up, not to make you jump through hoops. If I were starting over in that job, I'd put more effort into making sure that initial experience was girl-friendly, like our BJC curriculum today. (Although in fairness to me, Scratch was still 20-odd years in the future. I just had text-based Logo to work with, which was pretty kid-friendly but did require, you know, some syntax and some editor incantations. I did make sure we had floor turtles (a/k/a robots) to work with.)

PullJosh wrote:

cycomachead wrote:

Intrinsic motivation is better.

Absolutely. However, I'd like to play the devil's advocate for a moment. Are all students intrinsically motivated to learn everything? And if not, is that okay? Is having an extrinsic motivation any better than having no motivation at all?

Not everyone is intrinsically motivated, no. But I have no problems trying to build up motivation.

I think some extrinsic motivation is good, though, I think the culture and implementation of grades has reached extremes. I don't personally have much issue with a well paying job as the motivation for learning something.

The extrinsic motivation for grades doesn't typically come only from the fact that “bigger numbers are better” (though that's a part), but the social pressures and expectations about comparing students to each other.

I also think that teachers giving meaningful feedback is valuable, and this is probably some form of extrinsic motivation.

bharvey wrote:

So when I was a high school CS teacher back in the early ‘80s, the first thing I did was talk the school into letting me not give grades. (This was before computers took over the world; I don’t think I could persuade them today, because CS is now Important.) It was great. Kids would come and go at all hours, and once in a while some kid would ask me to teach him something (sadly, it was almost always “him” in those days), or I'd look over a kid's shoulder and make suggestions, gently for newbies and not so gently for old friends. Some of those kids, now age 50ish, are still among my closest friends.

That sounds like a dream class. It's crazy, in 30-some years, how different things can be. There's not a chance that you could get away with that today, even though (at least for me) it would be one of the best and most informative classes in my schedule. Not sure how much you have to deal with at Berkeley, but at my high school, teachers are mandated by the state to give pre- and post-tests that can show measurable growth, prepare us for every standardized test (AP testing, SAT, ACT, etc), and our schools are put into a publicly-viewable ranking system. Those rankings are based on the deviation of your students. It's called “no child left behind”, and the intent to is punish teachers for ignoring struggling students. Instead, myself and a few of my friends managed to put my elementary school on the naughty list by being advanced in math. It's pretty ridiculous.

All that is to say, I guess, that your description of a gradeless world is suddenly making me nostalgic for a time that I was never alive for.

PullJosh wrote:

bharvey wrote:

So when I was a high school CS teacher back in the early ‘80s, the first thing I did was talk the school into letting me not give grades. (This was before computers took over the world; I don’t think I could persuade them today, because CS is now Important.) It was great. Kids would come and go at all hours, and once in a while some kid would ask me to teach him something (sadly, it was almost always “him” in those days), or I'd look over a kid's shoulder and make suggestions, gently for newbies and not so gently for old friends. Some of those kids, now age 50ish, are still among my closest friends.

That sounds like a dream class. It's crazy, in 30-some years, how different things can be. There's not a chance that you could get away with that today, even though (at least for me) it would be one of the best and most informative classes in my schedule. Not sure how much you have to deal with at Berkeley, but at my high school, teachers are mandated by the state to give pre- and post-tests that can show measurable growth, prepare us for every standardized test (AP testing, SAT, ACT, etc), and our schools are put into a publicly-viewable ranking system. Those rankings are based on the deviation of your students. It's called “no child left behind”, and the intent to is punish teachers for ignoring struggling students. Instead, myself and a few of my friends managed to put my elementary school on the naughty list by being advanced in math. It's pretty ridiculous.

All that is to say, I guess, that your description of a gradeless world is suddenly making me nostalgic for a time that I was never alive for.

I'm really glad to be homeschooled.

How is a publicly-viewable ranking system allowed? That seems like a privacy nightmare…. :O

cycomachead wrote:

How is a publicly-viewable ranking system allowed? That seems like a privacy nightmare…. :O

Not individual student records, but the per-school “report card”:
http://www.berkeleyschools.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2016_School_Accountability_Report_Card_Thousand_Oaks_Elementary_School_20170130.pdf

PullJosh wrote:

All that is to say, I guess, that your description of a gradeless world is suddenly making me nostalgic for a time that I was never alive for.

Yeah, well, there were plenty of grades in the rest of the school. But I'm nostalgic for it, too. It was really fun. Every once in a while I'd decide that we were all going out for Chinese food after school; I figure Chinese food is an important part of CS education. There were two summers during which I took a few kids to California (the school is in Massachusetts) for the summer. Never in a million years could I do that today! Of course it was terribly wrong of me to have favorites, but I figured that was another benefit of not giving grades; at least there wasn't any question of my grading kids unfairly.

No Child Left Behind isn't just your school; it's every public school in the US. You can thank George Bush the 2nd for it; in between destroying Iraq he found a few moments to spend destroying US schools. (Although, I have to say, Obama bought into it, one of his big disappointing errors.) But it's just K-12. So, none of that for me at Berkeley, but instead there's the expectation of grading on a curve. It was dealing with grades – grading, exam writing, arguing with students about their grades, dealing with cheaters on exams – that convinced me to retire. So now my life is the same except I don't have to give grades!

@BookOwl: Yeah, homeschooling is a win. (Well, I'm assuming you don't have the kind of parents who'd teach you not to believe in evolution. That's the only downside of homeschooling as a movement.)

bharvey wrote:

Yeah, homeschooling is a win. (Well, I'm assuming you don't have the kind of parents who'd teach you not to believe in evolution. That's the only downside of homeschooling as a movement.)

As a homeschooler who doesn't have parents who teach me not to believe in evolution - yes, homeschooling is a win

Funnily enough, we're doing a course set in Christian Perspective™. But that's because it was the best resource we could find. It's not a bad course, besides when it claims that literally every religion besides Christianity is inherently a false religion. (Don't even get them started about athiest people.. they don't have any morals!)

I was a friend once of a boy whose mom had “unschooled” him all his life. Their day basically consisted of playing games and running errands for six hours and then twenty minutes spent watching KhanAcademy videos at the end of the day. I was open minded to this until one time I was playing Minecraft with them during the day and I realized they had trouble reading words like “coal” and “furnace” in the seventh grade.


It turned out that the mom had paid someone who managed to get their hands on a license for that kind of thing to tell the state government that their kids were getting an education. The boy and his sister both wanted to go to “real” school so badly but their parents wouldn't let them. My family and his eventually fell out of contact after the parents were so undisciplined that they repeatedly forgot the times and places we were supposed to meet up.


Now I can see the value of “unschooling” if he parent has three things they are willing to offer to the child
1. Discipline
2. Willingness to learn
3. Motivation to learn


The parents didn't want or need their kids to learn, and even if they did they didn't have the drive to make it happen. They actually signed up for online courses 10 times but dropped each of them after realizing that you actually have to call the teacher to be put in the class. Sometimes I wonder if it's actually legal what they were doing (and probably still are)

bharvey wrote:

I figure Chinese food is an important part of CS education.

I think you're on to something here…

birdoftheday wrote:

The boy and his sister both wanted to go to “real” school so badly but their parents wouldn't let them.

Yeah, that's a bad sign. Arguably that's child abuse and your parents should have called CPS.

But I don't know about the discipline thing. If their daily routine included an hour of reading (anything, even the Bible over and over, although some variety would be better), they'd have known how to spell “coal.” And if they wanted to go to school, it wasn't discipline or motivation that was lacking. It was just opportunity. If those kids had had library cards and permission to go use them, they could have gotten a fine education.

Well, that sentence you quoted was badly phrased on my part. I don't think there was any indication that they asked and the parents said no. But he mentioned to me that they wanted to and said that his mom probably wouldn't let them.

When I said discipline and motivation, I meant on the parents' part. I don't think that their thinking went along the lines of “We can learn by having fun,” it was more like “The Feds can't force me to drive my child to school!”, which probably extended to the library and other places of learning. And of course, this led to the kids just doing whatever they wanted during the day, which I know from experience leads to doing basically nothing, even with good intentions and motivation.

The problem with NCLB is not necessarily the goal, it's that congress people don't understand education. I met with one of the authors a couple years ago and he vehemently decreased that “assessment was easy” and “that's the part we've figured out”.

Welp.

cycomachead wrote:

The problem with NCLB is not necessarily the goal, it's that congress people don't understand education. I met with one of the authors a couple years ago and he vehemently decreased that “assessment was easy” and “that's the part we've figured out”.

Welp.

Yeah. Although, even if they could write a good test somehow, the existence of such a test would (did!) turn classroom activity into teaching the test. It's only at a very high level of abstraction that the goals are good. Once you get down to what they mean by success in school, it's all bad.

birdoftheday wrote:

And of course, this led to the kids just doing whatever they wanted during the day, which I know from experience leads to doing basically nothing, even with good intentions and motivation.

A.S.Neill wrote about Summerhill that when a kid who'd been to regular school came to Summerhill, you had to expect that they'd spend the first year just watching TV. And then that would get boring and the kid would start coming to classes. So I imagine that's true of unschooling, too; you can't just do it for a year. And of course you (parent) have to want your kid to learn stuff.

I'm having trouble imagining the parents you describe, unless they're from the far (religious) right and think that schools teach lies. Parents like that are poisonous even if they do send the kids to school. The poor kids probably weren't vaccinated, either.

birdoftheday wrote:

I was a friend once of a boy whose mom had “unschooled” him all his life. Their day basically consisted of playing games and running errands for six hours and then twenty minutes spent watching KhanAcademy videos at the end of the day. I was open minded to this until one time I was playing Minecraft with them during the day and I realized they had trouble reading words like “coal” and “furnace” in the seventh grade.


It turned out that the mom had paid someone who managed to get their hands on a license for that kind of thing to tell the state government that their kids were getting an education. The boy and his sister both wanted to go to “real” school so badly but their parents wouldn't let them. My family and his eventually fell out of contact after the parents were so undisciplined that they repeatedly forgot the times and places we were supposed to meet up.


Now I can see the value of “unschooling” if he parent has three things they are willing to offer to the child
1. Discipline
2. Willingness to learn
3. Motivation to learn


The parents didn't want or need their kids to learn, and even if they did they didn't have the drive to make it happen. They actually signed up for online courses 10 times but dropped each of them after realizing that you actually have to call the teacher to be put in the class. Sometimes I wonder if it's actually legal what they were doing (and probably still are)

How is this legal?
Where I live (North Carolina in USA) homeschoolers have to take a standardized test at the end of every school year, which should catch cases like this.

bharvey wrote:

@BookOwl: Yeah, homeschooling is a win. (Well, I'm assuming you don't have the kind of parents who'd teach you not to believe in evolution. That's the only downside of homeschooling as a movement.)

Well, I actually don't believe in Evolution (like cow-like creature to whale), but I don't believe it because I've done research on the evidence for and against it, and the evidence against it (no missing links when there should be thousands or millions in the fossil record, the near impossibility of evolving structures that rely on multiple components to work correctly, the Catch-22 situation of the first cell requiring water for the amino acids to form while also requiring the absence of water for them to join together, etc.) seems to strong for me believe it. I fall more in the Intelligent Design camp that says Someone created the world and the original creatures, and then natural selection and specification gave us the species we see today.

That said, I'm all for science, and I have never been able to figure out why some people don't like vaccines, so I guess I'm not your average far (religious) right person.

_nix wrote:

It's not a bad course, besides when it claims that literally every religion besides Christianity is inherently a false religion. (Don't even get them started about atheist people.. they don't have any morals!)

Well, if you are a Christian, then you have to believe that because that is what the Bible teaches. I don't know why they would say atheists can't have any morals though…

Do you mind if I ask what curriculum you are using?