You see this in school now. Instead of tests and studying everything is a fucking project, everyone has to do some gay presentation. Learning is irrelevant, it's just an opportunity to do arts and crafts and spread away all the responsibility.
They always excuse it with "you'll need to know how to work in groups and manage tasks efficiently for your job." When my adult life has literally been me finding jobs that let me work alone because I cannot stand the inefficiency that most people bring to every fucking task in their life.
My entire education was a long lesson in learning to hate people for how slow and stupid they were, and how many wasteful frills teachers add to tasks to keep me from doing more. From "showing work" to "draw a picture and color in the lines." All of it wasting time.
They do it so that when the kid gets the wrong answer, a reviewer can pin-point why they got it wrong and tell them how to correct it. "You flipped the sign on line 5" is significantly more useful than "you fucked up somewhere, IDK."
It's only a waste of time when you get the correct answer. Which is why I too considered it a waste for many years but first time you have to teach someone else, you get the point quickly. Though... I do doubt most teachers bother checking the work anyway.
It's only a waste of time when you get the correct answer.
Which is the point I was at. If I consistently got it wrong, then I would obviously need to step back and do things in more long form.
But if I'm clearly able to consistently get it right and just toss the answer out in 2 seconds, then the "work" is obviously unnecessary as I am showing mastery of the equation and concept. Which makes the "removing 50% of your grade for not putting an illegible left hand scrubbed mess on the paper" lack any principle behind it.
Which feeds into the bigger point of "intentionally gimping gifted kids into a schema meant for the drooling retards in their class" that plagues all education.
A sane world would give partial marks for correct working-out, in the event that the answer was wrong, not make full marks dependant on showing all working-out.
Which feeds into the bigger point of "intentionally gimping gifted kids into a schema meant for the drooling retards in their class" that plagues all education.
It really is abominable. Kills their passion, makes them lazy, robs them of ability to pay attention...
You knowing to step back means you're self-directed when it comes to learning. Most kids weren't. Most adults still aren't. You've correctly identified that schools are designed for the lowest common denominator. .
If you were fortunate enough to be in a school that actually rose to meet your level, the questions would become challenging enough that you you'd need to show your work for your own review.
"Show your work" itself wasn't the bad policy. The level of the work you were assigned was. The grading (which I agree is bad) is because it's the only tool they have to push the policy. At a good school they wouldn't need grading threats because, "I can't help you fix this unless you show me what you did," and your desire to understand the material is sufficient reason to show work.
I always thought it was to prevent cheating. In my math classes we had the actual answers in the back of the book, so anyone could have copied those. The homework was testing our knowledge of the methods.
If the projects were more like, "Use the physics concepts we learned to build a working wooden boat" or something that allows kids to see how the things they learn apply to real life, I would be all for doing projects more frequently than just doing tests, but of course that isn't the type of projects that they are doing in school, just dumbass shit.
One of my history teachers in middle school was huge on projects like that:
Write a rap song about your chosen African history subject
Build a sandcastle using what you learned about castles
Go and literally barter with beans for vegetables I brought in in a mock Incan marketplace
And I still remember that better than college courses I took. I still remember the day we had to start Standardized Test prep (which forced a textbook reading instruction set on her with no allowed deviation) and how absolutely miserable it made her and us.
You see this in school now. Instead of tests and studying everything is a fucking project, everyone has to do some gay presentation. Learning is irrelevant, it's just an opportunity to do arts and crafts and spread away all the responsibility.
They always excuse it with "you'll need to know how to work in groups and manage tasks efficiently for your job." When my adult life has literally been me finding jobs that let me work alone because I cannot stand the inefficiency that most people bring to every fucking task in their life.
My entire education was a long lesson in learning to hate people for how slow and stupid they were, and how many wasteful frills teachers add to tasks to keep me from doing more. From "showing work" to "draw a picture and color in the lines." All of it wasting time.
They do it so that when the kid gets the wrong answer, a reviewer can pin-point why they got it wrong and tell them how to correct it. "You flipped the sign on line 5" is significantly more useful than "you fucked up somewhere, IDK."
It's only a waste of time when you get the correct answer. Which is why I too considered it a waste for many years but first time you have to teach someone else, you get the point quickly. Though... I do doubt most teachers bother checking the work anyway.
Which is the point I was at. If I consistently got it wrong, then I would obviously need to step back and do things in more long form.
But if I'm clearly able to consistently get it right and just toss the answer out in 2 seconds, then the "work" is obviously unnecessary as I am showing mastery of the equation and concept. Which makes the "removing 50% of your grade for not putting an illegible left hand scrubbed mess on the paper" lack any principle behind it.
Which feeds into the bigger point of "intentionally gimping gifted kids into a schema meant for the drooling retards in their class" that plagues all education.
A sane world would give partial marks for correct working-out, in the event that the answer was wrong, not make full marks dependant on showing all working-out.
It really is abominable. Kills their passion, makes them lazy, robs them of ability to pay attention...
You knowing to step back means you're self-directed when it comes to learning. Most kids weren't. Most adults still aren't. You've correctly identified that schools are designed for the lowest common denominator. .
If you were fortunate enough to be in a school that actually rose to meet your level, the questions would become challenging enough that you you'd need to show your work for your own review.
"Show your work" itself wasn't the bad policy. The level of the work you were assigned was. The grading (which I agree is bad) is because it's the only tool they have to push the policy. At a good school they wouldn't need grading threats because, "I can't help you fix this unless you show me what you did," and your desire to understand the material is sufficient reason to show work.
It's also useful for proving that you're not cheating.
I always thought it was to prevent cheating. In my math classes we had the actual answers in the back of the book, so anyone could have copied those. The homework was testing our knowledge of the methods.
I remember our textbooks having solutions to only even or only odd questions. You'd get assigned from the set without answers as graded work.
Of course PDFs of the teacher's guide with all the solutions weren't hard to come by either.
If the projects were more like, "Use the physics concepts we learned to build a working wooden boat" or something that allows kids to see how the things they learn apply to real life, I would be all for doing projects more frequently than just doing tests, but of course that isn't the type of projects that they are doing in school, just dumbass shit.
One of my history teachers in middle school was huge on projects like that:
And I still remember that better than college courses I took. I still remember the day we had to start Standardized Test prep (which forced a textbook reading instruction set on her with no allowed deviation) and how absolutely miserable it made her and us.
Hype song for the Rhodesian mercenary forces capping commie jogger Africans incoming.
Work the rhyme wacky/khakis in there somewhere please.
Dats raciss.
And yet to this day I still know most of the story of Mansa Musa, something 99% of blacks do not.