Easy Money

This week, I'm teaching "Science Academy" at MVA. The basic premise behind this course is that students who failed a science course during the school year will have a last chance to do enough work to earn that missing credit in science. However, much like the pictured Spanish Inquisition, our school seems to find more last chances for our students every time we list them. Currently, the list reads as follows:

Attention students (and heretics)! Do not fail this class, or else you will have to take PM School after school to make up the credit.

Do not fail (or fail to attend) PM School or else you'll have to go to Summer School.

If you don't do that, you'll have to take another PM School class in the fall!

And so help us, if you make it to Senior year without passing this class, well then we'll just have to assign you a "special project" to make up the credit.

Oh, and if you don't manage to do that, we'll see if we can't look through your transcript during the hours before graduation and make one of your math credits count for a science course.

So you see, if you fail this one class this summer, you will only have one last- three last chances! You have three last chances!

Aside from my own professional disdain for the sheer number of last chances each underperforming student is given, the week has gone remarkably smoothly. For one thing, I only have half a dozen students under my supervision. For another, the day only goes from 9 AM to 1 PM. And I'm getting paid per session, which is the teacher equivalent of overtime, for every hour. Oh, and that's in addition to the checks I continue to get every two weeks for the fantastic amount of jack squat I've been doing this summer.

The money's great, but the work load's even better. As I write this post, I am currently sitting in a positively silent classroom, full of students diligently completing the work that they've been given. I don't have to lecture. I don't have to prepare anything. I merely hand out the packets of work that each science teacher left behind for their little failures to complete and make sure they spend their time working and not napping. This means I'm free to blog, surf the web, send annoyed emails to my prof about the bookstore's continuing lack of textbooks, and generally enjoy free time. Grading? We're looking for quantity, not quality here. If the students complete the work, it's good enough.

So remember, folks: the young people of our country are being groomed to expect multiple opportunities to succeed after they fail. These are kids who think life is a computer game with unlimited lives. Didn't get it that time? Ooh, tough luck. Try again! It doesn't matter!

When people talk about grade inflation, they're usually talking about the top 10% getting undeserved A's. I'm more concerned with the grade inflation of the bottom 40%. Given the fact that only a slim majority of NYC high schoolers graduate, one has to wonder how many of those "graduates" have been given 87 last chances to succeed. What message does it send to the kids who passed their classes on the first try when students who submit a lousy project two years too late get the same credit? How can we expect students to put in their best effort when they're constantly given do-overs and ever increasing numbers of last chances? How many do-overs and last chances will they get once they're employed in the real world? There aren't a lot of jobs that come with no consequences for failure.