Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesFanStrandedInEDM
I've tried my best to give a clear meaning of what the "No Zero Policy" is. I'm glad that some of you at least are achknowleging that it isnt just giving students a "free pass" and that they are actually accountable for their work.
Zeros are assigning a mark for work that was never completed, thus giving an inaccurate assessment of students grades, AND allows students to squeeze by without doing work. MEV does not give students this luxery. MEV MAKES the students accountable for their work.
The general concensus i've received from the CP community on this is that a student's ability to meet deadlines is more important than anything else being learnt in schools. The issues most of you are having with the "No Zero Policy" has nothing to do with the students learning and everything to do with kids being able to meet deadlines.
"Look Mom! I finally learned how to isolate X in an algebraic equation"
"It doesn't matter what you learned, you didnt meet that deadline and that is far more important that what you learned"
The primary goal of schools is to LEARN! They have the rest of their lives to meet deadlines.
I would be ecstatic if one of my underacheiving kids came up to me and said "Here, I did this assignment on the weekend, i'm sorry its late". So much lip-service is paid from kids wanting a second chance, but so few actually come true on it.
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I understand your point, however I think there's a larger context. And that is that schools have done a poor job of preparing kids for the next level and thanks to parents and institutions that coddle kids, it's getting worse.
You have probably seen both examples of the algebra kid above and the kid who is just irresponsible. You can probably quickly differentiate between the two. Why not just allow the teachers the discretion to determine which is which and hand out zero's to the ones who simply are too disorganized, immature, lazy or indifferent to meet a deadline?
By hardwiring a rule that says you can never give a zero, you truly don't have the ability to teach accountability to people who are a year or 3 away from finding out the hard way.
Maybe too philosophical for this thread, but if you look at the teaching profession, accountability, drive and excelling is suffocated from many inside the profession from its union. Your performance doesn't mean as much as your seniority, and awful teachers don't give way to good ones. Under this culture it must be near impossible to teach kids the exact opposite of what their unions are about.