zlacker

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+(OP)
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+i4
The point still stands. School doesn't teach you to handle stress and anxiety. It just creates some for you.

>>lmm+i4
dealing with stress and anxiety while your brain is still developing doesn't always go as you would want and the public school system surely isn't going to help them cope if they do react poorly.

>>lostdo+eg
It's a relatively low-stakes environment (in the long term, even though it doesn't feel like it at the time) where you have to deal with it. That's valuable.

>>lmm+i4
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+Yl
The grading holds you accountable, and places pressure to do better.

>>kqr+Yl
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.

>>Crypto+ep
A person who is stressed or anxious is already feeling pressure. What makes you think they need more?

>>lmm+Sp
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!)

>>lmm+vj
Unfortunately it only helps your anxiety if you KNOW that it's low stakes.

>>kqr+ms
Well you learn to deal with it by being subjected to it. If you treat people like they're fragile, and don't apply this kind of pressure, they will grow up as fragile.

>>Crypto+gY
This is fascinating and new to me. What's your evidence?

>>lmm+i4
It comes with age.

>>kqr+CY
In practically every sphere of human activity people are unskilled and get better through practice. Why would handling stress/anxiety be any different?

>>lmm+0d3
That one is easy! Stress/anxiety is a condition that makes all kinds of learning significantly more difficult.

A small amount of urgency can be helpful, but ideally it should be intrinsic (i.e. someone screaming at you or giving you letter grades is nowhere near as motivating as feeling that you can almost do it) and it's very easy to overshoot.

>>kqr+Pq3
OK, but that doesn't answer the question of how to teach kids to deal with stress/anxiety. I agree that placing them under stress/anxiety probably damages their learning. I still think it's vital life experience to gain before adulthood.

>>lmm+rA3
Moreover, with no pressure, many kids will simply not put in effort to learn. That something so common sense is now neglected is bizarre.

Good scholastic performance by students in East Asian is not because schools in East Asian countries are low-pressure academic environments.