Between the constant pay cuts and being treated like a punching bag—or worse, just a convenient outlet for everyone else's frustrations—it’s no wonder so many talented people have already walked away. Honestly, even more are probably planning their exit strategies right now. And goodness, working in public schools? People act like it’s some easy gig that anyone could handle. All they’d have to do is slash the certification standards—kind of like how some folks in this thread suggested on those PDFs—and suddenly we’d have a surplus of "qualified" staff. Just declare anyone with a high school diploma an "expert," and you'll see how fast those positions fill up with "professionals."
Maybe we end up with the standard routine, or maybe we get stuck with John Doe—where the teacher just decided, out of nowhere, to hand out straight A's to the entire school last year... or who knows, maybe the principal felt some sudden urge to play hero for some random kid after getting that letter, and that was just the final straw that broke the camel's back.
Man, oh man, you guys see what we're up against now, cold-hearted bastards. Seriously, giving stuff away for free? Total garbage—unless it's for my own kid, then sure, whatever. But for anyone else? Absolutely not.
Anyway, for all you people trying to scrape together enough points to hit the cutoff for applying to college... just wait until those rankings drop and everyone else's scores show up. You're in for a massive reality check.
frozenrider15 said:I’ve been eyeing the pharmacy technician program at a local medical school. But looking at the numbers, it’s a bit grim. The cutoff was 73 points, sure, but the last person who actually snagged a spot last year had 76.57. The year before that? 77.72. With my track record—mostly Bs in math during middle school and just two Bs in eighth grade—I don't exactly look like a scholar. And I don't have any extra credit to lean on. It honestly makes me feel for her. When I think back to my own high school days, I was sitting there with a C in math one year and an average that hovered right around a 3.0, yet I still managed to squeeze into a prep school. Looking back, I really feel for her struggle.
The thing is, though, with how much grade inflation there is nowadays, your grades would probably be straight As or pretty much a 4.0 anyway.
I was just thinking—what if they actually got rid of those elective grades? You know, the ones where kids just coast through? It’d be so much better if you were just left with the real stuff, like your actual math or geography scores, maybe a B in English or history, instead of being padded out by easy A's in art, music, gym, shop class, or religion...
It’s below, not above. When you hit 3.6, wrap it up at 3. If you try to close it higher than that, the IRS is going to come knocking and give you a hard time—maybe even toss you a cookie just to be polite while they're at it.
Nah, I was really just pointing out that hardly anyone is actually going to take the risk of grading below the class average—I mean, let’s be real, most of us already know exactly how much of a headache that's going to cause when parents start calling the front office. There isn't some magic, one-size-fits-all rulebook for this stuff; it basically just comes down to teacher autonomy.
Look, I’m telling you how it actually plays out on the ground. The folks over at the school board inspections? They almost always end up ruling "in favor of the student."
northerntiger9 said:The whole point of the recent reform was to move away from focusing solely on averages—grades shouldn't just be about the numbers. The idea was to reduce the number of formal, numeric grades and increase qualitative feedback, looking at the student's progress as a whole. It’s not a bad approach—even top students deserve a bad day now and then. If we did it the way you suggest, a straight-A student could have a few perfect scores, then catch a stomach bug or a fever during a test and end up with a 4.43 average—which effectively drags them down to a B.
Or take a kid with solid grades around a 4.6 or 4.7 all year. Then, in the final week of school, they take a big exam, the teacher is exhausted, and because there weren't enough prior grades recorded, the teacher decides to break that one exam into three separate mini-grades. Since each part carries less weight, one mistake results in a 4—suddenly, you have three 4s on the record, the average drops to 4.4, and the kid loses their A. We're talking about 10-year-olds in elementary school here, not high schoolers.
So—God forbid we ever go back to a system where elementary schools rely exclusively on robotic, arithmetic-based grading.
Yeah, totally... as long as the final grade stays above the average, nobody bothers to look at the actual math behind it. but if you have a kid who spent the entire year being a total nightmare—distracting everyone, turning in blank pages for all those "participation and effort" assignments because they figured "it doesn't count toward my grade anyway"—and you end up giving them a grade lower than their average, you can basically start counting down from three before the school board steps in and wipes your grade out if a parent files an appeal.
Michelle Nelson4 said:It never happened, and it never has. Besides, everyone does their own math in their head anyway, hoping for a little grace period or asking a teacher to "overlook" one bad test score if everything else looks good. Implementing two decimal places would mean that absolutely every single mistake counts toward the final grade. That would be pure chaos.
Personally, I think we should return to a 60/40 scoring model. We could make it so 60% of the weight comes from national standardized test scores, while the remaining 40% comes from core subject grades during 7th and 8th grade—no averages allowed, and certainly no letting someone's enrollment depend on whether they passed PE.
A transitional phase could work too: increasing the weight of national testing by 15% each year. So, in the first year it’s 15/85, then 30/70, then 45/55, until finally hitting that 60/40 split in the final year.
That would have a pretty significant impact on the quality of education in middle schools over the long run. Parents would actually have a reason to care about academic rigor rather than just being happy that their kid isn't being asked to demonstrate any actual knowledge...
Students would basically lose their minds over every single point difference. My stomach actually hurts just thinking about it.
But seriously, it was totally like that—back in my high school days, from sophomore through senior year, the choice was basically just "computer science" or... more computer science 😂 . There wasn't even an option to pick extra credit hours or advanced tracks for any other subject at all. But honestly, things had already shifted by the time my sister's generation came along.
And you know, I didn't even realize we had those elective choices back in middle school until about ten years after I graduated—I only caught on when I was digging through some old files and happened to glance at my old report cards. 😂
Man, construction engineering was always such a weird gamble—kind of like trying to pick a winner with Hugo, you know? You’re almost guaranteed to miss the mark. It was this funny split: the kids coming out of prep schools would breeze through math and physics, but then they'd totally tank their drafting classes and end up repeating a year because they couldn't draw a straight line to save their lives. On the flip side, the kids from the technical trades could handle a drafting board like pros, but they'd get absolutely wrecked by a calculus exam and lose a year there instead. 🤷
I’ve seen plenty of kids from the liberal arts track at schools like Miami Beach Senior High who ended up obsessed with math, and then there are those from the STEM tracks who basically lived for foreign languages. Honestly, I know people who went through the advanced math programs and couldn't even make it past freshman year in calculus or engineering. Meanwhile, you have others from that exact same math-heavy curriculum who went off to medical school, and then a third group who are straight-up PhDs in robotics. So, if you ask me... I guess you could say it isn't just about the high school or the teachers after all... 😉
Michelle Nelson4 said:That was actually two years ago, and it wasn't even an entrance exam—it was just based on their GPA. Her son had a 4.8 GPA, which sounds decent on paper, but he ended up getting rejected from all six high schools he applied to. It’s funny, really; at fourteen, you don't exactly realize that a 4.8 isn't quite cutting it when you're aiming for those specific competitive academies.
It’s just more proof that we shouldn't leave these kinds of life-altering decisions entirely up to a child.
The whole system is fundamentally broken.
I think we all know exactly what I’m talking about here. If you have just two B's on your transcript during seventh and eighth grade, you won't even get a foot in the door for an entrance interview at most of the top-tier prep schools.
I mean, look, how many high schools are even in Washington, D.C.? There must be at least twenty or so—so yeah, there was definitely a double-digit number of options he could have landed in. But, honestly... they weren't exactly those elite, Ivy League-prep kind of schools Mom had pictured in her head. So, naturally, she ends up paying the premium just to make sure he actually gets that "high society" experience.
He’d probably want some fancy math academy—or honestly, his mom would probably push him toward one—and I mean strictly those elite ones that have those grueling entrance exams, you know? The kind that are all high-end and trendy and just... prestigious. The problem is, any school he could actually get into is like an hour's drive away, which is such a nightmare! It doesn't even matter that his elementary school was halfway across town, because that place was super upscale and exclusive, so getting there wasn't even an issue back then. 😉
But what about the kids who just don't care for English and have zero interest in learning it? I’ve had several students pass through my classroom who were sitting at a C in English—sometimes with me, sometimes with another teacher—but they were absolute rockstars in their elective German classes. This was back in my "Attila the Hun" phase, honestly, when I used to demand the exact same level of rigor in German as I did in English. I didn't have to worry about stepping on anyone's toes or causing drama over teaching hours back then, though I did make one little concession—I realized that by the 7th or 8th period, these kids were just exhausted and hungry, so I'd let them snack on something small as long as they weren't making a mess of the room. They didn't even choose English themselves; the school just forced it on them as part of the curriculum. Yet, they somehow performed much better in German, which ended up helping their GPA for college applications. At least your kid is lucky enough that they can probably knock out French in high school—I assume they're taking it because it was required for certain university tracks. Edit: Sorry, I mixed up some names there—George Steinbrenner 🤦 isn't even in their target admissions area, and the easiest way to handle that is to enroll them in a French track. The kids who actually want to focus on their primary language usually opt for English. My students, though... they couldn't catch a break with English, and to make matters worse, some schools don't even offer German as a second foreign language option anymore. Just my luck. And really, your colleague could have made a different choice—they could have gone with English without the extra after-school programs.
Look, I’ll be honest—those kids who scrape by with just enough to pass? Usually, they’re the ones who never quite mastered reading fluently or nailed their multiplication tables before finishing elementary school. Or, you know, they might be dealing with learning disabilities that went unsupported because—let’s face it—parents were too checked out to push for an IEP or proper accommodations. Sometimes, it's just pure laziness. But those heavy D's that keep a GPA below 2.5? Most of the time, teachers just hand those out as a courtesy. It's basically a mercy move; everyone knows failing a kid doesn't actually fix anything, it just drags out the misery for everyone involved.
You definitely won't have access to the school buses—they only pick up kids who live within the specific district boundaries, so if you're outside that zone, you'll just have to figure out your own way there.