[flamesfever]

Originally Posted by Russic

For me the issue extends beyond sport. Sport has the luxury of having a fairly well defined winner and loser. School meanwhile seems to be a little more ambiguous with how teachers are told to treat children. Over the several years my wife has been a teacher she's been asked to do things like mark with a certain colour of pen so the criticism isn't taken as too harsh, or come up with 3 nice things to say about the individuals character on their report card. The kid who comes to class everyday and is a little pr*** to his classmates doesn't need you to take it easy on his poor little emotions and tell him how bloody awesome he is. My personal opinion is that one aspect of a teachers job is to prepare children for the real world, but instead many are kept from doing it.

Sorry, that got off the rails a little bit.

I agree, and also believe report cards should give some idea of a child’s standing relative to his or her peers. I believe this would spur an element of competition, and give parents an immediate warning that their child needed remedial help, particularly if they were in the lower part of the class. It could be done, in a less harsh manner than the old system of reporting the exact standing numerically, by stating what quartile the student was in.

From the comments on the report cards I got for my kids, you had very little idea how they were doing. It took us far too long for us to determine that one of our children needed serious help, as almost all the comments on his report card were positive for the first couple of years. Even the teacher interviews were not that instructive.

Another child of ours was rather mediocre in public school, but suddenly excelled in junior high. I asked him why that was and he said, "It wasn't cool to be smart in public school, Dad, whereas it was the opposite in junior high". Perhaps with a little more competition in public school, it may have kindled his competitive spirit and encouraged him to do better.