Grade Awarding 2021 - a thread.
1. For pupils and parents; it sounds daft but there isn’t much you can control right now. Teacher will play the main role in awarding grades, and there may well be some time or formal exam for subjects. But we don’t know exactly what yet.

1) 🚨BREAKING: Parents file lawsuit against Villa Duchesne High School for "intentional racial discrimination" against white students, and using "coercion, intimidation, and threats" to indoctrinate students into Critical Race Theory.

2) Students were told that all white people are racist because they're white, and that black students should "be free from discipline regardless of their behavior."

3) Plaintiff's daughter was subjected to "verbal attacks, and physical threats, social ostracism, false imprisonment, permanent damage to her reputation, and severe and continuing emotional and psychiatric injury."

4) In October a student claimed that the Plaintiff's daughter had stood up in class, pointed to a black student and said "Black Lives Do NOT Matter!"

However, the class where this vent allegedly took place was videotaped, and upon review no such event had occurred.

5) Following the accusations, the plaintiff's daughter was "subject to enormous social ridicule and threats of personal violence."

During a meeting, the principal and a faculty member allowed a black student to aggressively verbally berate the daughter, without intervention.

I posted earlier about Fake Ass getting bullied at school...
So let's take a look at some of his past tweets...the ones he forgot to delete before he became a US operative, US diplomat and clandestine....
These aren't photoshopped these are actual screenshots...

No wonder...

Here he says he was jumped...he has a way with the ladies....
He also says he never touches those girls...what did you really do Omastole, for them to jump you?
He also mentions his wrestling...

Maybe these tweets can give us a clue..
He also tells us his old school...
Linden High...New Jersey.

Linden high school...calas of 2010

On teaching without grades.
A long-ish (20-tweet) 🧵. Here goes.

So, you know how you write lots of comments on an essay/exam, and the student looks at the grade and never reads the comments? That's because when grades enter the picture, the learning stops. /1

Instead of focusing on learning, there is a lot of negotiation: can we find one or two points on the midterm as the student is just on the verge of A-?

Everyone is just on the verge of the next grade.

And all the evals are not about the class but about the grading. Really? /2

Is the grade at all informative? If you are just below the A- or just above that, is that giving the student any information about how to improve their knowledge or skills? No. t is just a useless, demoralizing & stressful smoke screen /3

Students' abilities, challenges, and learning are multidimensional. Providing feedback on these many dimensions is much more useful for promoting growth and learning than are quantized unidimensional grades. /3.5

There is an alternative: do away with grades. Keep the feedback -- lots of it (this is not less work for us teachers) but never summarize it in a unidimensional uninformative number (unless you absolutely have to). /4

Newlane University Manifesto--12 tenets: 1. Education should be available and accessible to every person on earth; making quality education inaccessible or exclusive is immoral. Education belongs in the same category as shelter, clean water, and basic food.

2. Education should be disconnected from geography. Students should be able to learn anything from anywhere on earth. With few exceptions, tying education to geography is a form of exclusion.

3. Education should be disconnected from a schedule. The most effective time to learn something is when the student is ready, not when the teacher or institution is available.

4. Education should not be admission- or permission-based, but freely available upon the asking. The current admission-based system is a vestige of a scarcity model that could only fit a limited number of seats in a classroom.

(4 continued) No one should have to be admitted or ask permission to learn a subject.

My thoughts about Covid in schools-
Our studies are crap. We haven't put appropriate resources into studying this. Merging "in-person school" v "remote school" across the country makes little sense since there's so much heterogeneity in what "in-person school" looks like. 🧵

A teacher in Louisiana in an area with high rates of covid & in-person school, has a class with just 2 students in it. The entire school has 37 students and 12 staff, in a building that can hold hundreds.
Should this school's data be merged with a school that's fully open?

How would merging such disparate data, and everything in-between impact our understanding of Covid in schools? What about when we compare it to the rates in children who are in virtual school?

Things often not considered that should be... Are kids in pods? Are kids doing virtual school in community centers/ churches/ other group settings? Are youth sports or other extracurricular school activities (music, etc) happening in-person. Heterogeneity exist in this group too.

What's asymptomatic testing of children in the community like? We know that children are under-tested, how can we say something is safe if we are NOT TESTING children at the same rate as the rest of the population. We can't embrace the "don't ask (test) don't tell" apprach here.