Oh you fucking assholes blowing smoke up your kids' asses and creating another yet-more-entitled group of motherfucking spoiled brats.
Now we don't have one valedictorian in high school, we have to have MULTIPLE valedictorians? You know what, I can't wait until your kid gets out into the real world and learns that out here we advance on MERIT, and there are no school boards you can complain to when your kid gets passed over for his first promotion. I hope your kid gets his or her ASS kicked in the real world when they learn that there are no trophies for everyone at the end of the work day. Or are you going to call your kid's boss when he gets reprimanded for turning in shoddy work or being late every day? When your kid gets fired, what are you going to do, hire a fucking LAWYER?
I am very upset that it is parents my age who are making this kind of BULLSHIT happen.
11 comments:
LOVE. And I raised three kids.
Yabbut they're still top achievers, doing shit that (judging by the top achievers I watched in the little rural-suburban high school my kids went to) I could barely conceive of in my day. (Yeah, I argue, so what.)
it sets them up, though. i have witnessed it right here in my tiny, bubble-like town. in the big, bad world, nobody is "special." sad, but quite true.
I admit I have heard of kids we all admired who went off to Cal Poly and then two years later are at Taco Bell and junior college.
I posted this before but the whole self-esteem thing is a pile of corrosive bullshit that's been heavily discredited by about a million different respectable studies. The gist of it is this: You take two groups of kids and give them a task. You tell group A, "Very good! You worked very hard!" You tell group B, "Very good! You're special. You have special talents and abilities." Next you give the two groups a different task. Group A, the ones you told were "hard workers" (sounds like a putdown, right?) works at it, figures out new ways to do the thing, and does it. Group B, the ones you told were so "special" and "gifted" fucks it up every time. They pout, they whine that this isn't the kind of thing they are good at, and then they quit. Because when you tell someone he's special and gifted and only he has this special thing inside himself and all the rest of that insufferable Disney garbage, you cripple the kid. You make him feel like well, life has dealt him this hand, and he's stuck with it. Whereas the other kids, the "hard workers," don't feel stuck, because working hard is something they can do. So they do better.
These self-esteem people can go blow their dogs.
What Archer said.
I'm of a mixed mind on this. For one I don't think it's necessarily blowing smoke up a kid's ass to be one of several valedictorians, since valedictorian is a kindof silly thing. Most of the really smart kids are back there in the top 10 percent, because they focussed on learning stuff and making mistakes rather than being "perfect". My school had two valedictorians, One who took the hard classes with the rest of us and one who took three teacher's assistant, Spanish and PE her senior year.
I have no idea how they turned out long term.
That said, kids these days do a lot more than we ever did. Our local school system, due to it's emphasis on IB and AP coursework consistently ranks all five HS's in the top of the Newsweek list. And the kids are plenty bright, but even the averagish ones are headed to state U where they will start as sophomores.
I do hate the esteem coddling we do with children's sports where every child gets a trophy attesting to their specialness. But that's not really the same thing as valedictorianship, which is a silly and pointless distinction that is lost on the kids that really know what they are trying to achieve.
"Esteem coddling." I LOVE that!!!
Next Olympics that takes place in the US, everyone who finishes within a hundredth of a second of the "winner" gets a gold medal! Woo hoo!
I'm still singin' that effin' song, Throckey.
Har. I actually didn't realize that "Easy" was a Commodores song, so that got me thinking about the Commodores, and then I wanted to listen to more Commodores so I created a Commodores on Pandora.
Caught in my own earweb!
Ditto on archer's comment.
I do like teaching my kiddo(s)(eventually) that everyone has skills, everyone has strengths.
People need to just trust life a little bit more is my thinking. Just live and stop TRYING to make things be certain ways.
My daughter gave my STBX a stern talking to the other day when he was fussing over something in a massively overly dramatic fashion. "But, Daddy, if you don't make mistakes, you'll never learn!"
She is so fucking smart. I'll tell her that, too. But, that's different than the crap that goes on out there in the wild world.
I was tracked into the "gifted" programs when I was a kid, but remember, my mom is Japanese, so this was not so special in my house, this was EXPECTED. And she never stopped reminding me, "What makes you so special?" This is not a slam on her, and for some reason I never took my mother personally.
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