I sympathize with this.
As a kid, I’d do the homework, put it in my backpack (thanks to my Mom), yet I’d completely forget to turn it in, despite the whole class getting up to do it, and get a 0%. Turning it in later for ~50% (thanks to sympathetic and confused teachers) saved my butt.
…And yes, I’m definitely neurodivergent.
I’m dealing with this exact situation with my oldest son who has ADHD. He scores great on tests and most assignments but the 0’s kill him. Now that he’s a freshman they are being even more strict about the busy work. He’s getting better but still at risk of not getting credit for one class this year because of a terrible first quarter that he’s having trouble clawing out of even after having a B and A in the following quarters. It was really hard getting him to turn things in regularly and it has nothing to do with him knowing the material, they just give so much damn work outside of school that it overwhelms him and I feel like nobody actually gives a shit about how different his brain works. It’s not like he doesn’t care, the way they deal with it doesn’t accomplish anything besides making him feel worthless and then I have to put in extra duty to combat that along with helping him be successful in ways that work for him. This ignorant meme or tweet or whatever was triggering for me and I was so happy to see your comment as one of the first ones ❤️
Good luck! You sound like an awesome, caring parent just from that.
Let me emphasize this is just my open thought and not a criticism, but in hindsight, what I’d wish I’d done in school is set more reminders.
Post-it notes? Bracelets? Phone alarms, more sophisticated apps? Maybe something auditory if that’s more his thing? Basically I wish I had set up some more structured notification system to beat me in the head. Of course, as a kid, I hated excessive structure, but that’s exactly why I needed it. And it gets more and more needed later in school.
And these days, there seem to be some excellent apps/systems for helping.
It’s not just forgetfulness or procrastination though, like people stereotype with ADD. Sometimes it’s just being “overwhelmed” that leads to a bunch of zeros. This is hard to deal with, and yeah, the “busywork” parts of school don’t help at all.
Thank you! That is exactly the kind of stuff we have worked on, post it’s in his pocket specifically have helped a lot. They were trying to force things at the school that was counter productive for him, like docking him points if he didn’t write all his assignments down in a daily planner and other nonsense that did nothing other than increase his mental load and anxiety. Fortunately he’s really been able to start turning a corner as we’ve worked on coping skills over the years and he knows I’m willing to go to bat for him when the school tries pushing things that make things more challenging for him. It’s like they want a school of little compliant robots rather than taking the time to get to know how the individual kids can be successful. I also realize a lot of that is due to under funding, lack of resources, and checkboxes for federal funding so I don’t blame anyone but all I can do is vote and advocate for my kids.
Problem is that the school-to-prison pipeline is a very real thing and kids that are held back or don’t finish school are far more likely to end up in prison than those that finish. The way school systems work in most of the US, the differences in outcomes for those with and without a high school diploma are stark and depressing. Finishing is as important as the education itself.
Read: End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale
It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.
It’s more correlation than causal - for the same reason that we couldn’t just give every student straight A’s and expect them to have similar outcomes as students who would have otherwise earned straight A’s.
Working backwards like that is like trying to help someone lose weight by tweaking their scale to always show a healthy BMI.
trying to help someone lose weight by tweaking their scale to always show a healthy BMI.
Assuming the scale is functional. Which is is not.
It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.
You’re conclusion doesn’t follow. Case in point: kids who are kicked out of school are more likely to become criminals because they are children and have potentially lost the only thing remaining in their lives that kept them on any path of any kind. And they don’t have to start dealing drugs and robbing people with all the extra time they have. A kid who has dropped out or been expelled can still be charged with truancy in most jurisdictions, and their parents charged with the same crime and fined (up to $1,000 in many places). An underage child can be taken from their parents based on truancy violations alone. Then there’s loitering, trespassing, panhandling, and a whole mess of other non-violent offenses that give a high school-aged child a criminal record.
A person isn’t a criminal until they’ve committed a crime. They aren’t a convict until they’ve been found guilty of crime. Most of the kids being expelled, suspended, sent to Alternative Learning “SuperMAX” Centers are non-violent offenders. They are put out because they can’t behave.
The argument from here is often that we have to put the undesirables somewhere. After all, it’s not fair to sacrifice the education of the other, well-behaved students. I agree. I also assume that most people would want to help these children. On that assumption, I’ll finish this post with two bits of info:
- COPS In Schools (CIS) was created after the Columbine shootings. The grant appropriated $750-million to hiring police offers (School Resource Officers or SROs) for placement in schools. Despite their fancy title, these are police officers and they can and do, at a frightening rate, arrest children.
- In 2022, a bipartisan bill, the 2022 Bipartisan Safe Communities Act, was enacted. It granted $1-billion dollars to the nationwide development of mental health resources (counselors, social workers, programs) in schools, and the entire country rejoiced. In 2024, the Trump admin cut the grant because of DEI.
We’ve chosen to police children instead of help them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about punishment for behavioral issues or expelling students. What I’m suggesting is that the logic of grades determining behavioral issues is flawed, and it’s far more likely that both the behavioral issues and poor grades are symptoms of something else.
I’m saying that throwing out the legitimacy of our metrics by fudging the numbers for these students is not the right approach and is in fact a disservice to them.
Speaking of disservice to kids in school, I recently learned about the “Three-Cuing” system and how it is basically making kids less literate by having them simply guess the meaning of things they don’t understand instead of teaching how to read context, subtext, and use critical thinking skills or basic phonics… It kinda pissed me off. Especislly since I had already been noticing a trend of young people online putting words into others’ mouths or defining words wildly differently than the norm and misunderstanding the entire thing they just read.
I heard about this too, and it’s so insane.
I saw an article recently about Mississippi (and/or Alabama?) 4th graders beating out California and New York on reading, and many were crediting that the state mandated phonics over this “take a guess” nonsense.
Am I reading this correctly? MS (and/or AL) having a better reading education system than CA & NY with this?? Wow.
Yes! MS went from 49th to 9th in like 10 years. Most people are crediting it to phonics and their willingness to hold students back if they don’t learn the material.
Something about holding students back seems like it might artificially inflate numbers. Like, if they administer a test in 4th grade while keeping the kids who are struggling in 3rd grade, well only the kids who made it to 4th grade are taking the test.
I’m likely wrong.
I mean, thats the point. If the student is not smart enough for the 4th grade, they get held back to try again. They are not 4th graders even if their age suggests they are.
Right. But while 4th grade has great literacy results, 3rd grade has 38 students per class who are deficient in reading now. How long can that last?
I mean, in theory, they learn during the repeated year and become part of the great literacy results of the 4th grade.
I’m likely wrong.
I dont think you are. Having higher requirements for 4th grade definitely bumps the results up, question is by how much? Not that many students are held back, no idea how much they would contribute to the statistic
I thought about that too, but I would imagine a LOT of students would’ve had to be held back to make this kind of impact on the state average. I would bet that the pressure it applied to students, schools, and parents did most of the heavy lifting.
I used to be a teacher. In my state, before COVID, 3rd grade is the grade that you don’t pass if you don’t hit certain criteria for literacy. After COVID, they didn’t hold anyone back due to an emergency executive order from the Guvnah. Pretty much all the teachers I worked with hated it and believed that holding kids back was beneficial to all.
Where? This isn’t something I’ve seen in CA schoolwork. My teacher friends have a lot of problems with matriculation right now but guessing at definitions isn’t one of them.
There were a bunch of articles when the data came out from the NAEP report card. Most I saw were mentioning phonics as the biggest factor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/mississippi-not-california-is-the-education-future/
It’s often being referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
I mean, both of those are right wing sources though.
I thought the second one might be (unfamiliar with it, it was just in the search results), but NYT is definitely not right wing, and the NAEP and Wikipedia are fairly neutral.
NYT has proven in the past few years its a trash rag propping up shitty right wing policies. See also the Washington Post.
Are you confusing NYT with the New York Post? I certainly see lots of headlines and articles critical of Trump in the NYT.
… Suddenly I think I understand why a some things with very specific meanings are getting redefined by younger folks who call you names if you don’t accept their new definition.
Three cueing peaked in the 90s.
Do you have any examples? I’m genuinely curious if this goes beyond youth slang into reshaping the language.
fr fr
“Three-Cuing” system
Huh. Apparently Georgia banned it last year, with a bipartisan bill that my (D) state senator co-sponsored. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one!
Your logic is very aesthetic.
Do you even conundrum what he’s saying?
Foreal cap.
I have a theory that the people who think having Ai make a summary of books were taught ‘three-cuing’ and thus, cannot actually read.
Incidentally there’s a really interesting podcast about teaching reading in the US, called ‘Sold a Story’. It’s wild how kids were supposed to somehow magic up the meaning of words.
That was a right wing grift, that is thankfully finally being phased out of most schools.
Especislly
Well, however you learned literacy wasn’t perfect either, I guess.
Can I have 50% of my salary for doing 0% of my work?
that’s what landlords do
False. They get much more than 50%.
And they work hard, it’s not easy thinking of bigger numbers every month /s
Are they discworld trolls per chance?
Go ask your master. It’s what school trained you to do.
I had a math teacher that would assign 100+ long division problems every night and then give you a 0 if you skipped more than 3 of them.
That’s horrible. Especially since I guarantee you and everyone else in that class had it down after the first 50 problems.
It astounds me how many teachers honestly think that teaching/learning is about drills, rote memorization, and slavishly grinding away to get results. While I have no doubt that some people absolutely need to do this in order to get things to stick, I think it under-estimates the intelligence of most kids in the classroom. I would argue it’s not exactly learning and more like programming.
For instance, I can recall “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” like some kind of Manchurian Candidate sleeper-agent. But that tells me nothing about how that organelle metabolizes ATP to fuel other activities, what happens when it breaks down, and so on. Memorization and drills are great for algorithms, formulas, and basic foundational things. But the real learning happens in other ways.
Yeah, my test scores were good, not perfect because I lost a lot of points due to penmanship, but good. More than enough to demonstrate that I understood the material. My grades were bad from not doing the homework. I had 2 study periods every day and whatever I couldn’t get done in that time wasn’t getting done. I didn’t care, I had better things to do after school. Having more than 2 hours of homework a day is totally unreasonable.
I ended up getting put in the remedial math classes the next two years because of her. Which ended up being kind of okay because basically all the hot girls were in there with me and I was good at math so they had reason to talk to me for help. So in the end I still won lol.
That’s cruel!
Yeah that lady was a real bitch.
The purpose of a class is to instill a specific set of knowledge and skills.
The purpose of an assignment is to provide the student with sufficient pressure to study the expected knowledge, and practice the expected skills. The assignment is the pressure to learn; it is not evidence of learning.
To the student who has achieved mastery of that knowledge and skillset prior to completing the class, an assignment has no valid purpose. For such a student, the assignment is busywork, and serves only to distract the student from further study.
If your grading style does not allow for a student to demonstrate mastery and refuse busywork assignments, your grading is a problem.
A student with test scores equal or better than the class average does not deserve to fail your class for having refused assignments.
A student who ritualistically completes all of their homework assignments with excellent marks, but is entirely unable to pass a test on the subject matter, is a student who has failed your class.
A student who ritualistically completes all of their homework assignments with excellent marks, but is entirely unable to pass a test on the subject matter,
is a studenthas a teacher who has failed your class.If a teacher gives out homework and a student masters the homework, then they fail the test… Then the teacher fucked up obviously.
All we can say from the given scenario is that the student has not demonstrated mastery of the subject material.
It could be that the teacher fucked up, and tested improperly. I’ve seen tests that didn’t reflect the subject matter; the teacher failed.
It could be that Mom or Dad were the ones completing the student’s assignments for them all year. The student never actually learned anything; the student failed.
If every student had the same experience, I’d be happy to point fingers at the teacher. But when virtually all her students pass, and this one “workaholic” kid can’t, that’s not on the teacher. That’s on the kid.
(Apparent) hard work is not evidence of mastery.
Actual conversation I had with an admin after I graded ab exam with 70/100 after a student made 2 big and 2 small mistakes on an exam
You have to grade her exam 100
But she made a bunch of mistakes
She wants the grading 100 or she’ll leave
But then what is the point of grading?
The grading doesn’t matter, of they pay, they get each grade 100/100
So they’re paying for fake grades?
Yes, this is all of paid “education”.
Private school I guess? I don’t understand the “or she’ll leave” if not.
Education under capitalism is not actually education.
It’s a country club for the rich and a prison for the poor.
Had a test graded on a curve in college. Actual score divided by two then add fifty. There were absolutely people that got a fifty. You’d think by dumb luck you’d get at least one right. It was multiple choice.
Meanwhile here in Croatia, some multiple choice tests actually have negative (penalty) points for choosing wrong so you can’t just guess.
Grades have always been meaningless.
People who believe in meritocracy and all that bullshit are just too privileged to notice.
edit: I didn’t even realize this was “white people twitter” but makes sense 100%.
Grades have always been meaningless.
That could not be further from the truth.
What is meaningless is to reduce grades so much that it’s impossible to recieve a failing trade.
I had excellent grades in math and less than ideal in chemistry. So I spent less time studying math and more time studying chemistry. And what do you know… my grade in chemistry suddenly and completely unexpectedly became higher. While my grade in math was still holding steady.
It’s a real mystery how I figured out that I should spend more time studying chemistry.
I’m glad the school system didn’t fail you.
I do realise that not everyone had a good experience with their school system. But to blame the concept of grades on that is silly.
Grades are meaningless to some people. They matter greatly to other people.
Video games are meaningless to some people. They matter greatly to other people.
The difference is that I didn’t get a scholarship and an education due to my ability to play video games. It was my grades that paid my tuition.
So if you didn’t study and you’re confident you’ll get less than 50%, it’s better to not show up at all than to attempt the test?
Tbf it’s true. Grades should not be a tool to hold anyone down, in fact there’s very little value in grading - it’s just a patch for incompetent education.
Grades are for administration, not students. Students would receive far better education if schooling was focused on them learning and thinking and developing important skills. But after the industrial revolution, schools were designed solely as thought terminating obedience teaching places
This is by design. MAGA wants kids to be stupid, only stupid people vote MAGA.
“I love the poorly educated” DJT
You are the only person 🧵 that pointed out the fact Grading is authoritarianism, and not education. For education we mentor, assign three tier groups (Highschool, Middle, Elementary), and rate by topics learned, and topics that require improvements. Number go up teaches nothing about “bad people in power abuse your freedom.”
“And if you work hard, maybe you too can get closer to the top of the pile”
The first problem is that we’re conflating Executive function with Knowledge.
If you get a 50 because you didn’t understand the material, that’s different from not doing or turning in the work.
I’m dealing with this now. The kid turns in his work, gets A’s and B’s, takes his test, and gets A’s. His actual work in school is all A’s, B’s and 0’s
He’s learning, he knows the material. He can’t hold focus, loses the paper, gets embarrassed if it gets a wrinkle, doesn’t turn it in, and won’t keep an organized folder.
He gets behind enough that he starts staying up late to finish the work and ends up falling asleep in class. We mediate with the teachers, stand over him to get him to do the work. Try to get him to keep it up once he’s out of our sight. We get back on even keel again 2 weeks later, and some teacher who’s behind on their grading does batch grading a week before the end of the semester, and we have 10 more assignments that weren’t listed in the portal the day before.
Some of his teachers will take a late paper and give him a 50 on it. That’s a huge advantage because coming from a 0 is hard.
And in before someone bitches at me that you can’t not turn in work in real live, yeah, I know what’s why we go to school and that’s why we’re working on it. Doctors, counselors, teachers, and parents.
Very true. I think there definitely needs to be a framework for accepting late work in these cases, which is much better than calling it 50% out of thin air.
After following a friend who joined XHS after the initial tiktok ban a year or so ago, I started to notice this trend of Chinese people calling American education “happy education” and I bristled a bit because I didn’t find it all that happy. But as I see more and more people point out things like this, how the No Child Left Behind policy was implemented, how resources are diverted away from actually educating children… I kinda get it.
To be fair, I think the Chinese also have a biased lens here since their school days are like twelve hours long, I’m sure 7 AM to 3 PM seems more like daycare in comparison. But I think there’s some truth in the mockery.
This doesn’t apply to doctoral programs which really just seem like abuse and trauma factories. I don’t know a single happy, well adjusted doctor.
China kills themselves for schooling and does as well as Americans in business and science so it’s hard to see one being better than the other.
We should just keep trying systems that push everything to the absolute extremes. It’s worked out for every other fallen civilization. Why should we be any different?
Maybe, just maybe, the objective of education isn’t just science or business.
Maybe being science/math/humanities literate is good for society as a whole.
I’m not trying to make an evaluative comparison between China and the US, I’m lamenting the state of US education and found a new phrase that felt descriptive about that online.
I would wager that the average Chinese citizen is more educated than the average US citizen. And particularly, students who attended school in China are more intelligent, on average, than US school students.
I don’t have anything on hand to back it up, but I would be shocked if it wasn’t true.
Nah, people are stupid everywhere.
I started to notice this trend of Chinese people calling American education “happy education”
Depends on your skin tone and overall level of privilege.
For many it’s a prison education that’s a pipeline to a literal prison.
This would’ve been a godsend to me tbh. I was really bad about completing buzywork homework assignments but I paid attention in class and already understood the material. In high school I’d ace every test and wind up with a C or worse because of the number of missing assignments, it wasn’t even intentional, I just frequently forgot about them because they weren’t interesting and probably because of some kind of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Of course, there are also kids who might struggle to complete assignments due to complicated home lives.
I don’t think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless. A 50 is still going to hurt you, it just doesn’t drag your grade into oblivion. If a student gets 100 on three assignments and misses a fourth, is a grade of 75 really the most accurate representation of how well they understand the material? Counting the incomplete as a 50 would make that an 87.
Sprinkling in zeros can really drag your grade down and can make it feel like your grade doesn’t really have much to do with your understanding of the material, and has more to do with being willing and able to work outside of school hours (or to just copy down answers from a friend five minutes before class, which I also didn’t do).
Rather than giving students points for not doing assignments why not just not have busywork assignments. Just make the grades an even 50% tests and 50% large projects unless the student needs their busywork graded.
I was in the same situation as you (except I did wind up diagnosed with ADHD in my 20s). I aced all my tests and never did homework so was constantly on the verge of failing classes. I always hated having to do the same repetitive memorization busy work when I already knew the info. The best teacher I had in highshool had a rule where they would only ever grade your homework if doing so would improve your overall grade. So because I did well on the tests, in class work, and biger projects I never had to actually do any homework. It’s the only class I ever scored over 100% in because I aced every test and did one extra credit project. Why the hell should anyone have to waste their time doing pointless busywork and waste their teachers time grading that pointless busywork when it isn’t benefitting their learning in any way. If the student doesn’t need it then just skip it. The only reason I can see for it is to desensitize students to doing pointless busywork jobs but we should be eliminating those jobs not conditioning the next generation for them.
Yeah, although tbf some people struggle with tests and for them homework brings up their grade, and it might help some people learn. But I 100% agree that it ought to be optional and shouldn’t be able to tank your grade if you demonstrate an understanding of the material.
I can sympathize with people who work hard and still score poorly on tests. But if someone’s a quick learner and they’re motivated by learning then naturally they’re going to put in less effort once they understand the subject, and making grades a reflection of effort rather than understanding feels unfair to people like us.
Exactly. Like I get that some people learn slower or some even just have a mental block when the word test is used even if they know the material. So for them homework is important. But if it’s not actually benefiting a student then why punish them for not doing it? The system my one teacher had where homework wasn’t graded unless the grade would help your overall grade seemed to work really well but it could probably be improved a bit because it did primarily just benefit those who were good at tests.
The best solution would probably just be something along the lines of having the grade be made up 4 point pools; tests, projects, classwork, and homework. Then just have the overall grade for the class be an average of the top 3. As long as you’re doing well in 3 of those pools then you clearly know the material. Some students struggle with homework for already stated reasons. Some students lock up on tests even though they know the material. Some students have a disruptive homelife that inhibits their ability to work on larger projects. Some students have health or family issues which frequently keep them out of class. With this solution, none of those students would be punished for one of those issues alone provided they can still demonstrate in the 3 other areas that they know the material.
tbh, it probably also benefitted the teacher because they didn’t need to grade as many papers and may have benefitted the other students because they may have gotten more targeted feedback on their homework (because the teacher had more time)
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I don’t think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless.
The wider point is that grades are already meaningless.
It’s so sad that people here believe that some imaginary meritocracy is being destroyed.
Exactly. It also gives students the ability to improve and not just give up.
Let’s assume 10 assignments determine your grade in a class. You completely skip the first 4 assignments and get 0%. If you completely turn around and score 100% on the next 6 assignments, your overall grade is 60% and you fail the class.
But! If you were the student who skipped the first 4 assignments, what incentive do you have to even try and improve?
The 50% score is to give students without hope a chance. If it’s college level, sure maybe failing is the best option. But high school? Middle school? Even younger? Give kids a chance to improve.
Assignments are not evidence of learning. Assignments are pressure for students to learn. They are motivation to spend time acquiring knowledge and practicing skills expected to be acquired from the class.
For students who master this knowledge and skill without that pressure, assignments are distractions from further study. They force the student to expend time and energy on previously-mastered material, rather than allowing them to focus on unmastered subjects or additional classes.
If I were building a grading rubric, I would say that the test score at the end of each unit is the minimum score recorded for any assignment in that unit. My tests would be killers: I would target 80% raw scores, but final test scores would be on a curve, with the median score being recorded as an “A”.
Score a 100% raw score on a unit test, and every assignment for that unit is raised to 100%. The student has demonstrated complete mastery of the subject matter; any grade less than 100% does not reflect their true capability.
Score an 80% raw score on the unit test, and every assignment for that unit is at least an 80%. A 95% assignment stays a 95%, but a 45% assignment is counted as 80%. Missing assignments are counted as 80%, not 0%.
I would go further: the raw score on the final exam replaces every lower grade in the grade book. You ace that indomitable horror of a final exam, you ace the class, regardless of how much effort you put in.
This is called grading for equity. It is really hard to do with short attention kids needing instant gratification. The question “is this graded?” being asked for every assignment shows their mindset. If you carefully explain that they will improve the tested skill with the practice, they lose all interest and score poorly on assessment if they even try. The learned need for progress points stymies equitable grading. The majority of students see schooling as a grind for points. They want to earn just enough points to level up without actually retaining skills so they can get back on TikTok.
