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Re: Where Have All the Boys Gone?



Michael Edmisten wrote (among other things):

Teachers often have such high pressure for giving good grades that they tend
to assign a fair amount of easy work, or a fair amount of extra credit work,
so the student can "earn" an A in the course even though the in-class exams
are only passed at the B or C level. In general, this motivates any student
willing to play the "busy-work" game... and I think this is more often
females than males.

when i first started teaching (about 20 years ago), I started giving
extra credit opportunities to my students. I didn't give extra-credit
homework or lab assignments, but did allow students to do certain
problems on the tests for extra credit. There wasn't any particular
strategy involved in this choice of the way I did it--it just seemed
convenient for my purposes at the time. I followed this scheme for
several years, but finally abandoned it, and have not given any extra
credit options for some years. The reason I abandoned it was that it
didn't seem to achieve its purpose, which was to give those students
who were in trouble a chance to dig themselves out of trouble. I
never noticed that there was a serious gender disparity among those
who took advantage of the opportunity, but what I did notice was that
the only people who routinely took advantage of it were those who
didn't need it. Studente who already had As or high Bs were the only
ones who every tried the extra credit work. Since I didn't intend the
extra work to be for their benefit, I finally quit offering it. I
still get questions from students who are in trouble if they could do
some extra credit work to make up for their deficiency, but I always
refuse their request.

Since the extra credit work I offered my students was not stuff do be
done outside of class, nor was it busy-work, I don't know if I would
have noticed the same things Michael did, but it seems to me that
extra credit work is likely to have the same effect he mentioned even
in the context in which I used it, since the students who could
really benefit from it, rarely take advantage of it.

The pressure to give extra credit stems from the pressures that both
students and teachers in high school are faced with. We have created
a society in which, without a high school diploma, it will be
impossible to find any kind of work at a living wage. Therefore,
there is pressure from society in general to make sure everyone
graduates from high school. In order for that to happen, no one can
fail. If we set our standards low enough that no one fails, then all
standards are pulled down accordingly. On the other hand, the
nation's schools are under intense pressure to raise standards, as a
result of the wide-spread perception that we have lowered our
standards, so that no one is learning anything in school. These two
pressures, it seems to me, are working against each other, and may
well be one reason why we are in such trouble.

Of course, there are other aspects of this problem--the desire of
most of our high school students to go on to college (and virtually
all of their parents that this happen), with the attendant pressure
on college admissions, and the resulting increase in the
competitiveness of the process; and the serious disparity in
achievement levels between various ethnic groups, which we have not
begun to address in a realistic way in this country--which complicate
the picture. But it does seem to me that until we resolve the
question of which way we want our schools to go--graduate everybody,
or have high standards--we don't have a chance to solve the education
problem because these two goals are working against each other and
will make any other approach have the same schizoid features.

But now that I've joined the ranks of the emeriti, it's your problem now.

Let me know how you are doing.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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