zero tolerance learning

[pktechgirlbackup]

I was homeschooled for 8th grade due to the utter absence of acceptable middle schools in my area. One of the neat things about being homeschooled was that I could occasionally replace my assignments with a different essay explaining why the original assignment was stupid. For example, I got out a textbook assignment on describing the voice of someone close to me by explaining that people we're emotionally close to or see frequently were the worst possible people to evaluate, because your emotions override the physics of their voice. I also got to stop after one chapter of How to Win Friends and Influence People because my first response essay explained the title was a lie, the book was about being a sycophant and manipulating people, and even if that wasn't true how was I supposed to practice the techniques if we weren't leaving the house?* Many people would describe essays like these as negatives about home schooling, but I think they were one of the best parts: if my boss tells me to do something, and I have information that leads me to believe I should do something else, knowing how to deliver that information in a respectful yet informative manner is incredibly useful.

Compare and contrast this with my brother's high school (large, comprehensive, serving a variety of income levels but leaning poor). The honors and AP teachers were extremely strict, wouldn't accept late homework, wouldn't accept arguments about exam questions. Why? Because they needed to Prepare You For College where That Wouldn't Fly. Anyone who's actually been to college, which as far as I know is everyone on my flist, should be falling out of their chair laughing now. College is all about asking for extensions and negotiating for some points back. The only place where you're expected to miss more deadline and offer more excuses is the real world. How to negotiate and clarify and eek out a little extra for yourself are exactly the kind of skills we should be teaching kids who will be the first in their families to attend college, especially since their parents aren't doing it.

I think we default to zero-tolerance-tardiness for the same reason we default to zero-tolerance-drug policy: it's an easy way to look like you're doing something. The people making the opposing case have to use nuance, and you don't, which gives you an advantage on the local news. And if something goes wrong, there's no judgment call of yours to blame. But zero tolerance for drugs is wrong, and this is wrong too.

*This was extremely early in the home schooling, before we'd filled in the outside activities.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I hear that professors are much more accepting of late homework, chronic procrastination, and related negotiations at the so-called elite colleges. I can't remember who I was talking to, but someone's very different state school experience made me suspect we're not actually the norm.

I think that goes pretty well with everything you're saying about magic words, but it also supports the idea that there do exist such colleges where lateness and otherwise being a square peg don't fly so well. It's just a question of what people are being prepared for.

I should probably see if my professor friends can support this anecdotal evidence with their broader experiences.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I remember easily getting accommodations at community college during high school, but it was all very minimal, reasonable requests. But so were all my requests at Cornell, as far as I remember. The ones I remember at MCC are "I have an award ceremony that night, can I please go to a different lab section", "Can I please take this despite a complete absence of appropriate prerequisites", and "I have mono and this test period falls right when I crash, can I please take the test earlier in the day." And that last one was with a prof I'd had for several semesters and really liked me. My mom has also confirmed that her state school (UC Davis) had some flexibility: she's the one who made the initial observation about Grant's high school. So I think it's still a useful skill, albeit one you'll use more at Harvard than anywhere else in the world. If you get more data I'd love to hear it: I have a nagging suspicion that CCs may actually like their students more than state colleges.

[lepid0ptera]

That might be the case for other zero-tolerance policies in school, but for tardiness I think it's a bit different. It's at least partially about classroom management; having people come in at all different times is pretty disruptive since it's distracting for both students and teachers.

An aside; how did you like the homeschooling?

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I meant more tardiness in turning in assignments than in showing up. It was the only word I could think of that included what I wanted in a single word, but obviously it has some other meanings people think of first.

Home schooling has its costs, but it was definitely the best option for me at the time. First, I wasn't afraid of being assaulted, and that was awesome.

Education wise, it was leaps and bounds better than any other option we had, but that's highly dependent on who's doing it: my mom (who was the homeschooling parent) didn't remember enough science or math to teach me, and even left me to myself mostly for social studies because my brother just needed so much time, but I was very good at teaching myself, and my dad did know enough and had the time to confirm that I wasn't teaching myself something wrong. Every homeschooled kid I was friends with started taking college classes by 15, usually 14. At the lower levels, where the academics are definitely within the grasp of the parent, I'd say it's an even bigger win, because so much of a child's time in school is wasted.

The big cost I saw was that it was really easy for parent to turn the awesome flexibility and responsiveness of homeschooling into a curse. A lot of kids never got the concept of deadlines. Faced with something that really had a deadline, like a science fair, their presentations were really half-assed. I had a partner at cornell who was homeschooled and just did not get the idea of a schedule even though she was on her fourth year at cornell (I say fourth year and not senior because she was anticipating at least another 3.5 years to graduate). That's the sort of thing I think you can help with good extracurriculars, and extracurriculars are essential. The Win Friends and Influence People thing came at the very beginning of the year: we'd already signed me up for a bunch of stuff, it just hadn't started yet.

Socially, I find the fears overblown, because the lessons we teach kids about socialization in school are *terrible*. Homeschooling is much more like the real world, in that there's no all powerful figure insisting you be friends with people who are mean to you. You maybe lose a bit because you're not forced to keep seeing someone you have a falling out with, but on the other hand, you can drift away from someone you don't like anymore without it becoming A Thing. There were some issues that paralleled "popular kid" issues, but they just couldn't blow up because you didn't have a critical mass of time together. It's worth noting that both Grant and I had very low affiliation needs at the time. Other kids might need school just for the social contact.

That said, I'd be nervous doing full on homeschooling from birth. If I had kids (which I don't plan on at the moment), I would start them in regular school for a lot of reasons: I'd like them to have some grounding in a place where mom and dad don't control everything, I don't want to do the work involved, huh, I thought I had more but that's about it. My ideal would be to sort of half school them, where they have to deal with a teacher and her rules half the day, and they learn some academics but mostly things like sitting still and shutting up, and their parents teach them the rest of the day, where they learn more efficiently but without the incidental lessons like waiting your turn while the other kid eats paste. Which is pretty much what the middle class has, I'd just change the hours distribution.

[scythe-of-time.livejournal.com]

"My ideal would be to sort of half school them, where they have to deal with a teacher and her rules half the day, and they learn some academics but mostly things like sitting still and shutting up, and their parents teach them the rest of the day, where they learn more efficiently but without the incidental lessons like waiting your turn while the other kid eats paste"

I had that for my 5th grade year. It was incredibly fucking awesome: the first half of the day was all about going to school and "making friends" (hahaha omfg -- all the kids resented me for having such an awesome schedule, so that failed misreably), and the second half was me at home filling out packets of information and mailing them in myself to an outside source who would grade it after my mom checked it over. 15 minutes of input from her, and woot, I completed 5th, 6th, and half of 7th grade in that one year, and then still had the rest of the day to goof off. :) Amazing.

Of course, the next year we moved and I had to be placed in school because my mom got a third job, so ... yeah. At least it was a college prep charter school (which was a whole 'nother adventure!).

[lepid0ptera]

What service did you use, if you remember?

[scythe-of-time.livejournal.com]

Susprisingly, my parents ordered books called PACEs, which are "Packets of Accelerated Christian Education." A lot of the material was easy to understand (until my parents got smart and ordered the harder stuff!), but the important part about it was that I was required to set my own schedule and stick to it wrt to doing the work. Being able to do that at 9 was amazing. I even made my own scrambled egg sandwiches for lunch! :)

Despite lots of spiritual images of clouds and metaphors, the math and English portions were remarkably well done. (Don't recall much about the science, *winks* but I do remember a few packets titled "Science Reasoning" that actually taught *gasp!* chemistry and a little physics and how to work those things out via critical thinking.)

My mother also supplimented my education with exhaustive forays into history and Greecian mythos and phonics, most of which involved critical thinking skills (e.g. "why were the local authority threatened by Socrates' presents?"). We also made an awesome color-coded timeline of major and minor events starting from the beginning of the universe to present day. It used up all the paper in the house and took one and a half years.

In short, the PACEs are great for basics - if you can overlook and/or accept the religious origins of the company. As with any homeschooling system, do ensure that you fill in the gaps so it's not just rote memorization of just the "facts" they want you to have. ;)

[scythe-of-time.livejournal.com]

presents = presence

Herp derp I has an educashun.

[lepid0ptera]

Ah, well that's also a "classroom" thing as well. For one, if one assignment is late then everything else is late, generally. And if it's late at the end of the year, and everyone else is as well because you've been too lax, then you may end up having one day to grade everyone's last three assignments.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Obviously it can be taken overboard. But I saw profs at Cornell grant extensions to the entire class because a few people had grant proposals due at the same time and she wanted to be fair.

[crystalpyramid]

As a teacher, I'm trying to think what might have motivated Grant's teachers to set things up the way they did. You can use strictness and zero tolerance on late HW to weed out lazy kids from honors classes, or to reduce your own workload. You can use it to level the class by penalizing the smart-but-lazy (or equivalently giving a bonus to the dense-but-diligent, since you're probably going for a certain average grade in the class). You can use it to reinforce your power over the class, by making sure that the kids are all sinners, so anything good that happens to them in class is a blessing they should be grateful for.

All of it, as far as I can tell, just amounts to making a class artifically hard, depressing the spread of grades by taking off points for things that ultimately don't matter. That's not a good position to be in — classes, especially AP and Honors classes, should not need to be made artificially difficult. In our Regular physics class we spend two weeks on significant digits and take off points all year when people get them wrong. Or we're supposed to, anyway. We've watered down the course content so much that we have to make it

[crystalpyramid]

...difficult in stupid ways. Whereas AP is actually hard and we have far better things to do than to worry about little quibbly things that give no deep insight. It helps that the College Board doesn't give a damn about sig figs on the exam.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I don't think the was the reason in this case- the classes were always on the verge of being canceled due to undersubscription, and East really made an effort to bring in kids who had very little chance of ever getting better than a three. Except the best subscribed AP class (History) had by far the worst issues, to the point that Grant didn't take the class.

But in general, I think you might be on to something. Is it possible that as the "we need to make this artifically hard" issue fades out, you start running into "kids smarter than teacher" issues, and the strictness is an attempt to control the classroom?