Teacher’s suspension shakes a graduate’s school pride
Re: “School’s zero intolerance; Teacher fears losing job after giving no marks for failed work,” the Journal, June 1. Since 2010 I have been a proud Ross Sheppard graduate. Then I read about Lynden Dorval’s suspension.
Dorval was my teacher for physics 20 and 30. In both courses I received marks in the mid-to-high 90s. I missed exams, labs and assignments, but when I got a zero, he always gave me the chance to make up the work. This ensured I was doing what was necessary to prepare for exams.
In hindsight, after completing two years of a bachelor of science at the University of Alberta, Dorval’s class was actually quite lenient. At university, assignments a mere five minutes late get a mark of zero.
The “no-zero” policy at Ross Sheppard is preposterous and setting up students for failure. It is teaching them that not finishing work will have no negative consequences. This is false for post-secondary education, employment and life itself.
Nicole Barbeau, Edmonton
School system is broken
I think the no-zero policy is a farce and I support Lynden Dorval. This policy leads to grown-ups who think that the world owes them everything.
I have three kids who have graduated from Grade 12 in Edmonton schools. When my oldest was struggling in Grade 7, I told the school to fail him and hold him back a year. I told them to give him zeros when he failed to hand stuff in. They refused. When final exam marks came in, he just squeaked by. I wonder to this day how much fudging of his marks went on.
I manage a small office and over the years have hired several dozen young people. The vast majority have the most entitled attitudes you can imagine. They don’t bother coming in if they don’t feel like it and see nothing wrong with this.
I pulled my youngest out of Grade 9 in disgust with public education. She homeschooled herself through high school while my husband and I worked full time. She has a very high work ethic.
Our public education system is broken badly. Someone needs to take charge and rebuild the system from the ground up. Or perhaps more parents should take their children out and homeschool them.
Linda Smith, Edmonton
Why do we beg students?
How much spoon-feeding is required to get students to hand in assignments?
The discussion about giving zeros for uncompleted work has been happening for years. We are aware the zero doesn’t always reflect students’ knowledge. It does, however, reflect their work ethic.
Note that it’s not Edmonton Public Schools policy to implement no-zero grading but is left up to each administrator. Most administrators don’t teach and therefore don’t have to chase students begging for their assignments.
What are we teaching these students about responsibility? Universities don’t chase students around to get assignments.
Where are the parents of these children? Therein lies the problem.
David Vetsch, Edmonton
How ‘no zero’ can work
We adopted a no-zero policy when I was principal at Fort McMurray Composite High a few years ago. The term “no zero” oversimplifies what we did.
In no case were teachers expected to give kids a pass or credit for doing nothing. Students who did not show enough mastery of a subject because they did not do the work by the end of the course were given an “incomplete.”
An incomplete was a real consequence for not doing what they were supposed to. We then worked with those students in the next semester to get them to complete missing work until they did show sufficient mastery to earn the credit.
I referred to that process as giving a kid a hand up, not a free ride.
Deciding what constituted sufficient mastery was in the hands of the teacher, who made a professional, informed judgment about each student considering the data from that student’s assessments.
To my mind, that is good for the student and professionally respectable. Tony Zeglen, Spruce Grove
Textbooks with legs
There is a much larger issue here: teacher professionalism.
In my work with an Alberta Teachers’ Association local, I focused on the erosion of the professional integrity of classroom teachers by their fellows in administration. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in student evaluation.
As teachers we are taught one of our professional duties is to assess not only students’ knowledge but their development into responsible citizens. Dictating to educators what marks they can or cannot give undermines teachers’ role and relegates them to an instructor at best — a textbook with legs.
High school budgets have become so dog-eat-dog in response to imbecilic government funding formulas that administrators are compelled to maximize funding by bulldozing students through as many credits as possible.
The entire culture of education is changing to conform to the business model envisaged by governments. The focus has moved from the primacy of the classroom to the power of the office.
Hopefully this uproar will focus public attention on how contrived, disingenuous and unprofessional student assessment has become.
Fritz Kropfreiter, Edmonton edmontonjournal. com To read more letters on this subject, go to edmontonjournal.com/ letters