That's super. Completely irrelevant to anything I said ... but just super. Good for her. And the anecdotal evidence she rode in on. And good for the presumed success of the other numero unos.
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SNOWFLAKES. [insert the face here] win again. No valedictorian at Ohio high school.
- Thread starter BobPSU92
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That's super. Completely irrelevant to anything I said ... but just super. Good for her. And the anecdotal evidence she rode in on. And good for the presumed success of the other numero unos.
True they are not. Mind versus muscle in a simplistic sense
What does it matter? Both situations are attempting to measure/award... ‘best’
In that send, they are identical.
Or you have no point. The point should be harder classes should be given more weight and valedictorians take more difficult classes because they’re smarter than the average student. You consider that “trophy hunting”, I consider it taking harder classes. If you’re point is that the system works against potential valedictorians taking shop classes, then I disagree with your point. They’re striving to get into the best colleges...shop classes aren’t going to help them do that.
Regarding the "participation trophy" commentary - that's more "back in my day" snowflake nonsense. You guys just want to be outraged. PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!?!? Oh noes!
3-4 decades ago, back in my youth, we generally didn't even start organized youth sports until 3rd grade or so. And we just played, during the 2-3 month season, and moved on to the next sport. Lather, rinse, repeat. You played sports with friends, casually, and then you showed up for your rec league, played that and moved on. You grew up doing this, and no one really cared or got ultra competitive until high school. At that point, maybe you started thinking about playing a sport in college.
Today, we're starting kids in "organized" sports before kindergarten ... so, yes, we give those little kids "participation trophies," because they don't have a clue what "competition" is, nor should they, at that age.
But, we have them playing multiple sports nearly year 'round by age 8 or 9. My neighbor has his kid on 3 hockey teams throughout the year (the seasons generally span 6 months each), plus the "elite" travel squad that goes to Canada, Vegas and other destinations to play in tournaments over the summer, in the "offseason." At age 8. And, the word is, if you haven't made this elite group by age 8 or 9, you have no future in hockey. High school may not even be an option. He's dropping 20K easy, per year (likely much, much more), and he says he just wants his kid to be able to make the high school team.
I ended up playing college baseball (non-sports-related injury ruined my once-legit pro prospects), but I didn't start playing T-ball until 2nd grade ("real" baseball wasn't offered until 3rd grade). In 3rd grade, we played in our in-town league - maybe 10 games in spring/summer, followed by a couple of silly playoff games against your buddies. That schedule continued for a number of years. We weren't in an official "Little League" or "Cal Ripken" organization.
Today, a very good 3rd grade baseball player's season starts in fall ... when he's practicing with his AAU team. He's typically having private lessons and other group workouts. That continues over the winter. Then, in the spring, he's playing his typical in-town rec league, in addition to his AAU travel schedule (often to neighboring states, including tournaments - 2 to 5 extra games on the weekends). And then he plays in the summer "all-star" league representing the town in travel baseball. And if in 5th grade and beyond, you can add Little League/Cal Ripken tournaments to that schedule. A year ago, a summer All-Star squad playing in our travel All-Star league, and in the Little League tourney, ended up playing 30 games over 30 days, in summer.
Basketball isn't much different - with travel leagues and AAU during many seasons starting in 4th grade.
Soccer is much of the same ... travel soccer representing the town requires a fall and spring commitment. Most kids also play indoor soccer during the winter, and a good number play club soccer on top of it.
And on and on ...
And most kids are playing multiple sports, while doing 1 or more of the above.
Today's generation is ULTRA-competitive, not a "participation trophy" generation.
The phenomenon isn't much different in academics, where kids are pressed to take more, and do so earlier, than ever before. And supplement with outside learning. The high school course offerings look more like a university than any high school I remember from my generation. And they're being pushed and pushed.
The top kids press to take as many AP courses as humanly possible, in part to boost their GPA.
There's a whole world of courses in between AP Chem and shop class.
My point (and this was clear in my post, so I don't know how you missed it) wasn't that they seek out the easiest, or easier courses, but that they feel pressured to take the courses that will lead to the highest weighted GPA, and that eliminates their ability to pursue other courses of interest ... which could end up not only broadening their knowledge base, but introducing them to a subject matter that they weren't necessarily enamored with before (or which goes from a curiosity to a love). There are only so many AP courses to chose from, and if you want the highest GPA possible, you have to take as many as you can ... and that means leaving off some courses that are only offered at the Honors, or even College Prep level.
The voters apparently didn't think so. Didn't even make it out of the primary in his congressional race.
I misunderstood your post...my bad. I don’t think it really affects many kids though because as pointed out in other posts, not that many kids are competing for valedictorian.
Unfortunately that’s what sports has become. My son did the whole travel baseball and basketball thing and he loved baseball, but basketball was just work for him. I was all for him hanging up basketball, but he wanted to play and be with his buddies and the only way to do that was to participate in the whole travel thing. It would be great to get back to the days of playing sports in season and having time to be a kid, but that time is gone.
You make good general points, but are missing the undercurrent of the type of high school that Mason is. It has a lot of Chinese students, who many would think are abused by their parents who push academic achievement very hard.
A couple of examples [Not from Mason but very similar to what is going on in Mason] that I am familiar with. (I know many Chinese due to having had 2 Chinese wives in the past. First deceased. Second divorced) One young Chinese man I know scored a 35 (one away from perfect) on the ACT and his mother never even complimented him. A Chinese friend of my son (both graduating seniors) scored in the top 3% on the National Merit Scholarship Test, and the father of the student considered the score to be a failure.
My son goes to a high school similar to Mason. He has a 4.2 gpa. (With 33 ACT -- top 1%) I asked my son's counselor what his class gpa ranking was and was told it was 40 or 50 in his senior class. Through very hard work my son raised his ACT from a 26 to a 33 through 5 tests. He could raise it higher, but I think it is ridiculous. He is going to a very good college with about 85% of his tuition being paid. Absolutely no point for him trying for higher grades or scores, although if I pushed him the way that the Chinese generally do, he would probably be a competitive student with some shot at being valedictorian.
Mason has about 900 students in its senior class with roughly 50 to 125 students of Chinese ethnicity as part of the class. Since courses like English and History have large subjective components, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the 5th best student from the first. If the gpa spits you out as being the the 5th best student at Mason, the effort required to be number 1 would be immense for pretty much no practical reason. Yet the Chinese parents are pushing their children to do this.
I know of 2 suicides by Chinese teenage residents of Mason occurring in the last 18 months.
I would support Math and Science competitions because they are much more objective. I don't see the point of having a valedictorian at Mason because there is no practical difference, almost certainly between the 5th best gpa student and no. 1 scoring gpa student.
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anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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Right. But shop classes might help you pursue an interesting skill or hobby. It would be a shame to allow students to be so academically driven that they become less-dimensional. Also a shame to overestimate the threat of students becoming less dimensional, while wasting time posting in a college fan board.
Instead of demanding that Rivals stop showing absolute numbers that you would have trouble matching, just downplay the importance of those numbers and come up with a more favorable number and highlight that as a true measure of your abilities/achievement. For example, you have a 2.25 likes/message ratio while Bob's is only (a still respectable) 1.25. Therefore you are a superior poster to Bob in that respect. And you can say that you could catch up to him by posting a few hundred times per day if you really wanted to. Then tell everyone who will listen that Bob spends far too much time obsessing over his board work to the extent he has no time for anything else and few friends. You meanwhile have a life and do other things and should be judged on other factors.I agree. This BobPSU92 guy has 8 million likes or something, and I have less than 500. It makes me sad.
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So the only place where we are allowed to have "winners" is in sports?
Are we allowed to have the Spelling Bee? or do we need to have all the kids up on stage spell kat and give them all a prize?
Not only should we do away with spelling bees, but we should no longer correct a child's misspelling. Don't stunt their creativity or risk making them feel bad about themselves. Let them be themselves and spell however they want.
You'd probably have more likes--and might have even been valedictorian--if you correctly used "less than" and "fewer than."I agree. This BobPSU92 guy has 8 million likes or something, and I have less than 500. It makes me sad.
bwifan
Well-Known Member
Time to just do away with GPA's ... too stressful. While we are at it do away with ACT/SAT's, again too stressful. No class rankings either... Only thing should be is if you graduated. Errrr wait that could be deemed to stressful as well. How about that you "attended" high school ... no telling University's if you actually graduated. The world will be a much less stressful place. Biggest decision will be whether to use tongs on a scone at Starbucks...
Valedictorians appear to be a newly endangered species, so we won't be able to obtain any brain tissue samples for comparative analyses to answer your question.So do I have fewer, or less, brain cells than a valedictorian?
The snowflakes are outraged that some high schools are moving to the same system of recognition of academic achievement as is utilized by the great majority of universities.
Apparently this means we should also stop fixing spelling errors, thereby setting in motion the complete collapse of the English language and, ultimately, life as we know it ... because that's what happened in colleges when they adopted the Latin Honors system.
So endeth A Song of Valedictorians and Vo-Techers.
Apparently this means we should also stop fixing spelling errors, thereby setting in motion the complete collapse of the English language and, ultimately, life as we know it ... because that's what happened in colleges when they adopted the Latin Honors system.
So endeth A Song of Valedictorians and Vo-Techers.
If you're going to correct grammar on a football board at least be right about it. You'll sound more like a valedictorian if that's your thing. You actually had me worried that I've been using it wrong all these years.
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https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/08/10/less-or-fewer/
Secondly, in sentences and phrases with ‘than’, you should use less with numbers when they are on their own:
√ His weight fell from 18 stone to less than 12.
√ A person with a score of less than 100 will have difficulty obtaining credit.
and when talking about distance, time, ages, and sums of money:
√ Companies less than five years old are the ones bringing us new job creation.
√ Per capita income is reckoned to be less than 50 dollars per year.
√ Heath Square is less than four miles away from Dublin city centre.
But hold on, I hear you say – the measurements (years, miles, dollars, etc.) are in the plural, so why isn’t fewer the correct choice? Not so! We use less in such cases because we’re actually still referring to total amounts (of time, money, distance, etc.) rather than individual units.
I posted earlier that my senior son went to a high school similar to Mason and that his 4.2 gpa ranked him 40th or 50th. Asked him today who the valedictorian was, and he said the school didn't have one. That surprised me. His school is very competitive and achievement oriented, and the lack of a valedictorian doesn't seem to have hurt.
Tomorrow is senior day and they will give roughly 30 individual awards to a class of around 410 students. Seems about right. My son will be receiving an award as the best student in the choir.
Tomorrow is senior day and they will give roughly 30 individual awards to a class of around 410 students. Seems about right. My son will be receiving an award as the best student in the choir.
Nah. They’ll get mowed down by all our school shooters.
Do high schools in China slap a fancy sounding name on the student with the highest GPA, and make them give a speech?
Glad you have your finger on the stuff that makes or breaks a nation.
I’ve heard they put their toilet paper on the holder with it hanging underneath, rather over the top, so maybe we’re safe after all, Khrushchev.
I think this signifies the opposite of what people think it does. This isn't happening because American high schools are "soft" -- it's actually happening because high schools are much more rigorous. There are so many more kids taking AP and IB today and really challenging themselves. It's a great thing. I have a nephew who completed his second year of AP calculus -- as a SOPHOMORE. That was completely unheard of 15 years ago.
At really strong high schools, the choice of a single "valedictorian" is arbitrary because there really isn't one kid who stands out ahead of all the others, there's a whole group of kids who are at the absolute top tier. And that simply wouldn't have been true a generation ago.
My kids graduated from Central Bucks West and those graduating classes typically had around 20 kids who were basically valedictorian material, typically 2 or 3 headed to service academies and another dozen to Ivy League schools. One of our daughters ended with a class rank around 10 or 11 (maybe 2 Bs in four years) -- and she was good enough to get into Penn.
There might have been a dozen kids with straight As all four years -- so the final GPA and class rank depended on the weighting of the courses that they took, and that weighting can be kind of arbitrary.
For example, if one straight-A kid fills an elective with AP statistics, and another kid chooses instrumental music and makes all-state orchestra, how do you decide which one is more deserving of honor? With course weighting systems, the extra AP puts the first kid ahead.
So shouldn't it be fine for each high school community -- principal, school board, PTA, teachers, students -- to decide how they want to handle it? Some want to stay with the tradition of declaring a single valedictorian, some do co-valedictorians, and some have abolished the title entirely and they honor their top students in other ways. It's not "soft" schools that have this problem, it's the elite high schools.
Meanwhile, it's the people complaining about all this -- aren't they the snowflakes?
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True, but game over for them too. What's the saying? I lend you a million dollars, I own you. I lend you a billion dollars, you own me. I lend you $10 trillion ....
Hahahahaha!!!! It appears that some of the easily upset snowflakes are not jilted high school valedictorian wannabes, but rather McAndrew board posters.
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