Day 66

      Alberta high-school students can take a very valuable lesson from Lynden Dorval's suspension by the Edmonton school board. After refusing to heed repeated warnings and deadlines to complete a certain task - giving the consequence-free mark of "not complete" to assignments not handed in, instead of zeros - he received meaningful disciplinary action. Setting aside whether this suspension and the policy behind it are just or practical, this is the real world and employees get in trouble when they don't follow the rules. He is being punished for holding his students to the same standard of behavior that he is being held to by his superiors, under the umbrella justification of doing what's best for the students. The lesson here, as students who passed their English classes by actually handing things in already know, has to do with irony.

      Of course being a students is not the same as being an employee, and nor are high schools meant to have policies completely analogous to those of employers, government or otherwise. However, high-school students are mature enough to grasp the logic and meaning of a system that gives them grades proportional to their work (non-existent work, logically, would receive a grade of zero), and lazy enough to avoid any kind of work the moment they are given the opportunity to do so. Students erupt in applause whenever a teacher extends a deadline for them, so that they may promptly avoid doing their work for just one more day or two. "Thank God," we'd say, before promptly going home and not making any use of the extra time to do the work.

      Under the no-zeros policy, the word "deadline" is robbed of its very meaning. The word dates back to the Civil War, and it was used to describe the distance from camp that prisoners could not stray beyond, lest they be shot. Now, it seems to be more of a friendly but easily-ignorable suggestion, like a best-before date on a can of spam. Does removing the consequence for not meeting a deadline actually help teenagers who are struggling with motivation problems? It's not known, empirically, whether this policy actually reduces the number of failing students in some meaningful way, or if it merely diminishes the standard of success so much that failure is no longer perceptible either semantically or statistically.

      Lynden Dorval's principle, in his letter to the school board recommending suspension, wrote that "...those students assigned zeros were not being held accountable for completing assignments." But under the no-zeros policy, students are never really being held accountable. An uncompleted assignment is ultimately removed from grade calculations as though the assignment never existed, with no effect on the average. How can universities now trust the grades of Edmonton students? Perhaps students with excellent grades will deliberately avoid doing the most difficult assignments, to spare themselves from the work and risk. If my average were 90%, and by not doing an assignment my average would remain the same, in effect I'd be receiving 90% on the assignment for not doing it, and this would be mind-bogglingly unfair to students who did the assignment and whose averages suffered as a result.

      There is a secondary criterion attached to every assignment students do, independent from content, in the form of a due date and consequences for late or incomplete work. The idea is that students are marked on the quality of their work, but also marked on their ability to do the work on time. If a student doesn't do the work, it stands to reason even in the mind of a well-taught kindergarten student, that the mark sooner or later should be a zero, and the zero should actually mean something so as to teach the student that it's important to do the work! It is shocking that the Edmonton school board could disregard such an basic foundation of education.