Aug 10
31
New Ontario guidelines let teachers give zero credit for zero work
National Post – August 28, 2010
Freedom to fail: New Ontario guidelines let teachers give zero credit for zero work. What a concept
By Marni Soupcoff
Thirty years ago, when I was a young kid, some Ontario public schools were still using “the strap” as a form of corporal punishment. Not my middle class elementary school in mid-town Toronto, mind you. But my friend’s rural elementary school in central Ontario — and I’m sure countless others where the idea of discipline still called to mind leaving the kids shaking in their boots.
Moving on from such a coarse mode of punishment was a good thing. (Although most public schools abandoned the strap and cane on their own, the Supreme Court of Canada effectively made corporal punishment illegal in Canadian public schools with a 2004 decision.) Yet it’s amazing how quickly the education establishment moved from striking our kids to coddling them.
The big education story this week was that Ontario’s Ministry of Education has released new guidelines that will allow teachers to give students a “zero” grade on assignments they don’t hand in on time. By golly, it’s a sensible idea: It’s just disturbing that new guidelines were necessary to empower teachers to take this obvious step. A ministry directive from 1999 had left some of them feeling hamstrung since they were supposed to separate students’ work from their behaviour. So while they might knock a few points off a student’s “work habits” report-card component for a paper delivered a month past due, they would still be expected to give said paper an “A.”
Read the complete article here.