What is the point of doing a lab if the students don’t get to make mistakes and learn from them??? Why don’t they just watch a movie, if that’s the pedagogy.
I am so glad we homeschooled.
They’re just trying to screen out the inept lab partners I guess. In reality, though, most mistakes like mismeasuring, spilling, not getting a great sample for a slide, cross-contamination etc. are not going to be prevented by a quiz.
My daughter had an experience like that in middle school for Algebra I. If the kids “failed” the pre-quiz, they couldn’t do that day’s lesson. Of course, since the course builds upon previous material, it’s near impossible to catch up. I was furious. I ended up putting my child into AOPS’s algebra I class. I also supplemented with material we had lying around the house (uh, my sister had vetted high school math material for her school district the previous year, so I had Algebra I, II and Geometry books and workbooks at home). I will say, five years later, my child is doing much better in math than her old classmates. So, karma.
Such pre-quizzing just makes learning more difficult and ups the stress level. The more I hear about your schools, @TheGFG, the less I care for them. Yes, the school district may produce many elite school acceptances/NMFs/many AP 5s but the cost is way too high for my taste.
That’s lazy teaching. The #1 rule for teaching is Start where the students are.
At the middle or high school level, the more valid reason for a pre-quiz would be for the teacher to know which prerequisite material may need to be reviewed while doing the day’s lesson or lab. Using it as an added “weeder” seems like just adding stress for no good reason.
@“Cardinal Fang” It was a lazy teacher. Luckily we had a workaround for the teacher.
I’m always surprised at how lazy teachers can be or are. The worst part is how often the lazier teachers give out better grades (they don’t really check homework, they just hand out 100%; worse, they hand out extra credit for non-academic things) so both students and parents like them.
If I ever move to NJ – or if I know of anyone who wants to move to NJ – I’m sending a PM to TheGFG for the name of her school district to make sure to live anywhere but there. I don’t have school-age kids anymore, but I still don’t want to live there.
That science lab policy is absurd and ridiculous.
@SlackerMomMD - “I’m always surprised at how lazy teachers are or can be”… As an AP teacher I say … Ouch. I certainly do not deny that there are good teachers and less good teachers (which is true in EVERY profession) but I find blanket statements like yours offensive
,
@toowonderful, I didn’t mean it as a blanket statement. I’m sorry you read it as such. I meant A FEW teachers are lazy. I was surprised when I came across ONE particularly egregiously poor teacher.
My apologies
@SlackerMomMD - accepted 
Bet my HS chem teachers would have loved trying to impose such a pre-quiz on me and one lab partner I had considering we actually blew up stuff by accident on two separate occasions.
In her case it was because the beaker was just subjected to experiments with hot liquids and she absentmindedly tried washing it with cold water during a period of cold weather. In my case, it was due to mishearing the chem teacher and thinking she actually wanted me to place a beaker filled with a volatile material reacting with water on the bunsen burner…whoops!.
Didn’t seem to adversely affect my lab partner’s college admissions outcomes(UPenn) or choice to major in an area of chemistry.
Also, some chemistry majors/teachers/Profs I’ve known/chatted up are of the mind that making mistakes…including sometimes blowing stuff up by accident is one of the effective ways for students to learn chemistry.
I agree with fireandrain: Wherever the TheGFG’s district is located, I do not want to live there!
I agree with @QuantMech, as an Asian parent. The environment simply is too toxic and detrimental to the health of our children, us parents, and the community.
Not living there isn’t enough, I hope the sort of “arms race” would stop everywhere. I don’t blame any parent for participating in the madness. I lay blame in large part at the door of elite schools and college rankings [e.g., USNWR] for placing too much emphasis on the END results of test scores, number of AP’s, et cetera. I have some ideas for how to fix the problem in [url = http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1847680-egpa-and-iec-demystify-holistic-admissions.html]another thread. Many posters think it’s unworkable, elite schools won’t care, or how I cooked up the ideas. And the discussion is closed. Many of us have only 1-3 children and can’t afford to lose any to psychological damage or worse. We owe them a better learning environment.
As to the “kneeling on rice” reference, I don’t sense @TheGFG shows any racial biases, but I think few, if any at all, Asian parents have such a power over their US born children. The kids are well educated and know their rights. It’s more likely that if a parent says “eat more broccoli” the second time, her little kid might say “don’t push me, it’s child abuse.”
Completely off subject…
In middle school, I was put in charge of the science supply “room” (more of a large walk in closet) and was responsible for handing out supplies to students. This was a serious mistake, as I spent the rest of the year completing many “unapproved” experiments. My favorites being chemical volcanos (ammonium dichromate, who knew it was toxic?) and anything that involved Hydrochloric Acid. Good times…good times…
This is an opinion piece by a parent in the district in question, who happens to also be an education communications strategist (and former school board chairman) : http://eduflack.com/2016/01/04/easing-student-pressure-starts-with-parents/.
That’s crazy. Two hours a night of homework for a second grader? The proper amount of homework for a second grader, in my view, is zero hours.
For the record, kneeling on rice, grits and other grains is an actual punishment still in use (google it) by parents of differing ethnic groups, among them Hispanic/Caribbean parents and US parents from the South. So is making children hold up heavy objects, such as school books, as a punishment, including for poor academic performance. There are youtube videos made by Korean kids that document that particular one.
To be honest, living in the south, I’ve never heard of “kneeling on rice”. Our idea of punishment deals with denying access to video games, TV, friends, cars, shopping, etc. It’s not the norm to punish anyone getting B’s.
Of course we have our “tiger” moms/dads (of many races/ethnic groups), but we have far fewer and they are not as “militant”.
All of the southern states still allow schools to punish kids physically. Not even parents, school teachers and officials and such. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/18/19-states-still-allow-corporal-punishment-in-school/
…thigh I admit, kneeling on grits just sounds messy