this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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Anon does well in school (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 14 hours ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 73 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

In my experience, if you're the smartest kid in your class, you're not smart. You're just in the wrong class.

Also, if you're the dumbest kid.

But I'll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don't want everyone failing. You don't want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say "These are the good schools/students and the bad ones".

Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.

[–] thedarkfly@feddit.nl 20 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

If there really were a single dimension axis of smartness, won't there be a "smartest" and a "least smart" in every classroom? And if they're in the wrong class and they leave, won't there be two new pupils at the extremes? This argument of "you're in the wrong class" always sounded elitist to me.

The important is that the teacher tailors the teaching to the students. Spend more time on the ones who struggle, give extra stuff to do to the quickest (e.g. help teaching to other pupils).

I've also always been against separating children by "intelligence". Having a "smart" class and a "dumb" class is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That being said, there are children who have special needs and who require a teacher who has the proper formation to help them.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

If there really were a single dimension axis of smartness, won’t there be a “smartest” and a “least smart” in every classroom?

Moment to moment, presumably. But your cognitive ability waxes and wanes for a host of reasons - mood, exhaustion, calorie consumption, experience on the problem set. If you test ten kids over ten iterations, and each testing gives you a different permutation of rank, which kid is the smartest? If you have four kinds of intelligence exams and four different kids all place 1st in one of them, who is the smartest? Is the kid who aces Numeric Problems but flunks Word Problems smarter or dumber than the kid who middles in both?

The important is that the teacher tailors the teaching to the students.

Sure, which is why you want to cluster kids by current ability rather than some holistic but ambiguous attribute like IQ score or head shape. But you don't really see this sorting by ability until upper-end high school elective classes (sorting the Bio 1 kids from the Bio 2 kids or the Honors musicians from the fuck-offs).

That being said, there are children who have special needs and who require a teacher who has the proper formation to help them.

Sure sure. But we're defunding all that under the current administration, so its a moot point.

[–] thedarkfly@feddit.nl 2 points 2 hours ago

Sure sure. But we're defunding all that under the current administration, so its a moot point.

Just a quick comment that I am not american ;)

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 12 hours ago

And with homework, grades are an approximation of how much your parents can help you.

[–] potatoguy@lemmy.eco.br 23 points 14 hours ago

If I might say, schools in the past teached VERY badly (beatings were the least) and most of the time they only put people middle classed and above into them, if you were not at least middle class, you were in the mines. So comparing to today, people in the past, comparing socioeconomically, were a lot worst than today.

It's like comparing poor kids today agains the sons of kings in the middle ages, there were gaps in education, not everyone went to school in the past.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 12 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

In an essay included in Expanded Universe, Robert Heinlein talks about his primary education in a one-room Missouri school house. He learned Greek, Latin, trigonometry (maybe calculus as well?), deep history, etc.

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 15 points 12 hours ago

I can’t talk about Heinlein’s education, but my grandmother’s one was based almost exclusively in rote memorization. She “knew Greek” as in she could remember by heart sections of Greek texts and their translation. Same for Latin. History was learning by heart lists of kings, date of birth/coronation/death, but fairly little in depth understanding. Nowadays the focus in ancient languages in learning their culture and to translate, for history is learning not only dates but reasons and connections between elements.

We also care way more about having the same education for everyone, that was really no concern a century ago. Each school was doing whatever they wanted.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

What's important to note is that there has been a big shift in the goals and techniques of education. This most famously occured with "common core" math in the US. It was a push to teach math in a more intuitive way, one that directly corresponds with what children already know. You can physically add things together by putting more of them together, and then counting them, so they try to teach addition with that analog in mind.

Prior to common core math, there was "new math," which anyone under 80 years old assumes has always been the standard. New math was a push to teach math in a more understandable way, one that gradually introduced new concepts to ensure children understood how math works. This was satirized by Tom Leher in his song "New Math." If you look up the song, you'll see that new math mostly was implemented by teaching students how base-10 positional notation works, and then using that understanding to present addition and subtraction as logical algorithms.

Prior to new math, the focus of math education was much more about getting the right answer, rather than the skills needed for problem solving using math. This allows for a higher breadth of education, as topics can be covered quickly, but each topic is understood in a shallow way.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

It's kinda funny because that larger trend is paralleled by my own personal trend. Back in grade school, I thought the math answer keys were useful information, useful enough to make learning it unnecessary.

Later on, I realized that the answers were meaningless without the context of the problem and put equal importance on the process as the solution.

These days, the solutions themselves are mostly just curiosities and it's all in the process, which parallels life itself nicely.

Or in the context of video games, one frame displayed on the screen shows millions of results of a bunch of math being repetitively done as you play. Those solutions only matter for a brief instant before new ones are needed and the previous ones often just discarded, though occasionally saved and even sent out to the world for others to appreciate the brief moment they are relevant.

[–] don@lemmy.ca 7 points 14 hours ago

No Anon Left Behind

[–] arrow74@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 hours ago

Honestly mood. I'm doing my master's degree having completed my bachelor's pre-covid and this program is way too easy