When it comes to school and grades, I become easily overwhelmed and concerned. My mind is overcrowded with a mixture of stress and frustration. However, it wasn’t always this way.
There was a time when a true appreciation was held for learning important skills like sharing and communication. Nowadays, it seems like all that matters is the state assigned curriculum, which doesn’t resonate with a person at all.
Schooling in the US focuses more on the grades earned than any educational opportunities. Students are expected to cram all the information into their heads just in time for the test, but learning doesn’t work this way.
Human minds need explanation, repetition and time to take in and practice the given knowledge. A school’s time limit and incredibly large curriculum doesn’t allow for proper learning.
The way grading works is an even worse characteristic of what school has turned into over time. We show our comprehension through tests and percentages, but how accurate of a representation is that?
If a concept is repeatedly brought up throughout a test, you better hope you understand how to do it. If not– no matter how much you understand everything else– you will receive a bad grade. What sort of representation would that be of your understanding of the curriculum? That test score doesn’t measure what you learn– it measures what you don’t.
Our entire school system is based on this corrupt grading method.
In the ideal school, students would be learning both the curriculum as well as life skills. These life skills would be the foundation for their future occupation. And any form of assessment would be an appropriate measurement of what an individual could learn with the materials given.
In the real world, that kind of assessment would be incredibly hard to create. Instead, school boards should work towards a fair grading scale. Teachers should focus a little more on the students’ learning and a little less on the grade. And students should always try their hardest to learn the concepts presented to them.
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