zlacker

>>lxm+(OP)
> Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines.

That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace.

Teach students that they are entitled to bad behavior, bad work habits, and deadlines? Fuck deadlines

The next generation is going to have a hard time competing in the global workplace against cultures that do enforce reasonable consequences for fucking up.

>>gramma+Oh
When I fucked up in middle/high school, it wasn't because I was lazy. It was because I had no idea how to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines. I had teachers who luckily were empathetic and I grew up eventually. I was lucky - I have fantastic parents in a loving, stable marriage and my mental health on the whole was not extraordinarily bad.

Many kids are not that lucky. In my experience, the kids (my peers) who were doing drastically badly weren't lazy. They had something else going on - a bad home life, or serious mental health issues.

>>bthesh+jo
Dealing with stress/anxiety/deadlines is a vital life skill. At some point people have to face failures and consequences (even if the failure was "not their fault"!) and learn to handle them; if they don't do it in school they'll be doing it for the first time in college, or in the workplace, or with governmental requirements.

>>lmm+Bs
Sure, but are you really arguing that getting bad grades is a good way to learn how to deal with anxiety? Do you have evidence for that statement?

>>kqr+hK
If you were starting from scratch and looking for a way to teach people to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines, what would you do? Setting up a realistic, consequential-feeling but ultimately not too consequential, environment with stress/anxiety/deadlines where they would practice and learn seems like the common-sense way to do it to me. Even if you had specific things to teach (coping techniques etc.), you'd probably still want to have that kind of environment to test them out in practice.

>>lmm+bO
Well, if I'd start from scratch I'd try to run experiments in different classes and see what works out best. Perhaps with a slight bias toward no grades because of the people in my life, there's a strong correlation between "cares a lot about grades" and "stress is psychologically harmful".

But fortunately I'm not starting out from scratch. People have made those experiments already. Grades suck.

Among other things that do work, guided retrospectives are one idea I would be tempted to implement. (Hell, we software developers know that too: when we want to get better, we hold retrospectives, we don't ask the scrum master to assign a letter grade!)