IN THE CORNER…
Seeing as I haven’t written for so long I have put myself in the corner – this is an ongoing joke between myself a a few Twitter friends – if they misbehave I send them to the corner lol…As you can see from the photo above I (my second life avatar) am wearing a tall pointed hat. A dunce cap, also variously known as a dunce hat, dunce’s cap, or dunce’s hat, is a pointy hat. In popular culture, it is typically made of paper and often marked with a D or the word “dunce”, and given to school children to wear as punishment by public humiliation for misbehaviour and, as the name implies, stupidity. While this is now a rare practice, it is frequently depicted in popular culture such as animated television series.
The images used are from Second Life – and the school is a very quaint victorian style school (owned by myself) – it also reminds me of one of my favourite television programmes when I was a child “The little House on the Prairie” feel free to visit The Schoolhouse – and please leave your name and a message in the guestbook – I would love to know you dropped by.
Since then I’m glad to say things have got better. I have lived in Italy for many years and although education continues to make progress there is something that rather distresses me. From elementary right through to Secondary school students are graded half way through the year and if their grades aren’t sufficient they have the rest of the year to catch up. That said by the end of the year if more than 4 grades are insufficient they must then repeat the whole year – unless they spend part of their summer catching up and studying they are then given an extra chance of a final exam which then if passed in the various subjects entitles them to continue into the higher class the following school year. This is all very well and good for students who are prepared to take on this commitment not all are this way inclined and some students unfortunately have taken their lives. Does this happen in your country? Do you have a better or worse education system and what and how would you choose to make it better if you could?
I live in Virginia, and in the school districts around here, students in lower grades are allowed remediation during the breaks. In high school, we have summer school for most core classes, which basically compacts a whole year into about three weeks of all-day classes. We don’t have any kind of last-chance test, though students are not held back in all classes due to one. Credit is given for each unit, and some students are actuaaly allowed to take two or three levels of English, for example, at once to ensure they graduate.
Hi Jo, that’s interesting! I think here the system has its pros and cons – but some kids who are perhaps good in languages but not so good in theory of other subjects are somewhat penalized – and to make them re-do the whole year is not always a solution – this can backlog and some kids will find themselves older than the average age of their fellow pupils this can cause an inferiority complex if you ask me…
That can be a serious issue in middle school (grades 6-8 around here), especially, since kids mature so much around age 13-14. And it’s been my experience that the schools tend to push kids through as much as possible to avoid the inferiority complex, as you said, but also to avoid any difficulties with much more mature members of the opposite sex around, if you know what I mean.
In high school, it’s not as much of an issue, I don’t think. Kids’ friends may not even know exactly which classes they’re taking, since everyone’s kind of on their own, so they have less embarrassment (those who actually are embarrassed; you’d be surprised how many of my students really don’t care about grades at all…).
We’re on a year-long schedule, so if kids fail, they do have to repeat the class the next year (if they don’t take or fail summer school), but I prefer the block schedule I’ve worked with in the past, where students take fewer classes at a time and classes are over at the end of the semester. Repeating a class, then, can be done before the year’s over.
I don’t have mahy positive comments to make on the Greek schooling system.
In high school (3 years) and lyceum (3 years) students are constantly tested (i’m talking about A LOT OF TESTS) and then take exams at the end of the year. If their average isnt over 10/20 they can retake exams at the end of summer. The biggest problem is that due to the insufficiency of public schools and the great number of lessons, students then attend private schools to learn everything that schools can’t teach them.
After-schools lessons are a big thing here. Parents pay huge amounts of money so their children can learn maths, ancient Greek, science etc. The same applies to English lessons. These types of schools are a big business here. Towards the end of lyceum, this is considered a must and costs quite a lot.
To sum up students attend school in the morning where they learn nothing, and then attend more lessons all through the afternoon to acquire the basic knowledge necessary to pass a class and hopefully gain entrance to a university.
I live in Virginia, and in the school districts around here, students in lower grades are allowed remediation during the breaks. In high school, we have summer school for most core classes, which basically compacts a whole year into about three weeks of all-day classes. We don’t have any kind of last-chance test, though students are not held back in all classes due to one. Credit is given for each unit, and some students are actuaaly allowed to take two or three levels of English, for example, at once to ensure they graduate.
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I live in Virginia, and in the school districts around here, students in lower grades are allowed remediation during the breaks. In high school, we have summer school for most core classes, which basically compacts a whole year into about three weeks of all-day classes. We don’t have any kind of last-chance test, though students are not held back in all classes due to one. Credit is given for each unit, and some students are actuaaly allowed to take two or three levels of English, for example, at once to ensure they graduate.+1
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Interesting topic. My kids are in Italian schools (age 6, 9 and 10) and fortunately get great grades. But I often teach young people who have got “insufficient” grades at the end of the year and need to catch up over the summer before being re-tested.
Every country has it’s “culture” of education, and often these things persist in time because each generation has gone through it and so thinks it’s “normal”. Many things about the Italian education system are crazy (for example, the fact that teachers hold their union meetings DURING school hours, so the kids lose lessons), but this at least has the effect of setting clear quality standards from an early age.
Where I grew up, in Britain, many more young people seemed to leave school with no qualifications at all than they do in Italy.
Thanks to you all for the feedback, reminds me I must write a new blog post sometime, am getting really rusty at this point ha ha. It seems there is a mix of what goes on around the world but the Italian system is some what ‘crazy’ as Daniel puts it. Another thing about Italian schools especially where English is taught, is the teaching is very much based on the grammar and when the kids leave school they can’t speak a word of English, that can’t be quite right can it?!