<p>I think it’s easy to accept that a person making decisions would make them for the wrong reason. It’s just that in the context of being chosen for a performance, our school doesn’t have any rules at all other than that the student be passing all classes (and that one is actually state law.)</p>
<p>I think it’s important to distinguish between awards that are purely objective, like “highest scoring on bb team” and purely subjective, like “sportsmanship”. If one student wins the “sportsmanship” award for 5 different sports (saw that happen at a middle school presentation) that seems a little much. (Having helped coach one of the teams in question, I can tell you that there was no one girl who clearly vaulted to the front of the pack in being a good sport.)</p>
<p>Just wanted to point out that TheGFG said that TheGFG D is in a stopwatch-timed sport. There is one member of the team who has the fastest time. There is one member (maybe the same) who has the fastest average time. There is one member (again, maybe the same) who has the fastest time average time for the last half of the season or the last month. There might be one who has the fastest time in the state meet. These could all be the same person. If not, there could be some disagreement about which time “counts” for award purposes. But it shouldn’t be all that hard to determine who is objectively best at this sport. Someone else could be “most improved,” no problem. But I don’t get the criticisms of “entitlement.” </p>
<p>If someone has the lowest number of strokes in a PGA tournament, they win. They are entitled to win.</p>
<p>But we don’t know the criteria for the award. If it is a team sport, then the person who is the “best” on the team may not be the same as the person who is perceived to have contributed the most to the team. The assumption – at least through posts – is that the athletic award ought to go to the kid who is team captain or who had the best time or who qualified for nationals. But unless that is spelled out in written criteria – it might not be the way that the people who do the coaching see it. They may be looking at a more global perspective: who contributes the most to the team effort? who is not only looking out for themselves, but also helping the others on the team to become better players? who has been most consistent in terms of their contributions? who shows up for practice in the rain? who sticks around at the meets after their own events to cheer the others on? </p>
<p>I don’t have a clue about the specific circumstances involving other people’s kids on this thread. I just know from my own life experience that the person who perceives themselves to be the “best” or most “important” within any group is not always perceived that way by others. And many people do see “awards” as an opportunity to acknowledge and applaud the very significant and meaningful contributions of the individuals who historically have constantly been overshadowed by others – precisely because selection criteria are subjective enough to allow the opportunity to look a little deeper.</p>
<p>The guy with the lowest number of strokes in the PGA tournament is definitely going to win that tournament. It doesn’t mean that he ought to be named “Golfer of the Year”.</p>
<p>You know ultimately the young adult needs to find validation from within. Being that we are all adults, we know that awards are few and far between. We also know that life isn’t always fair. Rather than focus on the unfairness of it all, I think it might be more productive to teach them how not to need awards to feel good about all they have accomplished. I know that is easier said than done and it is always very difficult to stand by and watch as someone worthy goes ignored. However, it happens all the time and we can use these instances as teachable moments. At least that is what I tried to do as this happened to my own son. It wasn’t easy, but I do think it helped him gain perspective and an internal strength that will hold him in good stead as he embarks upon his adult life. Just food for thought.</p>
<p>In D’s sport, there are not only times, there are also individual event titles pertaining to successive levels of competition such as the conference, the county, the state section, the state group, and the entire state. There are school, county, and state event records. There are team level designations such as varsity, MVP, and captain.</p>
<p>So it’s not that you couldn’t make an argument for children in addition to my D because you certainly could. But for an honest person it would be pretty darn hard to make an argument for anyone else if it meant the exclusion of my D.</p>
<p>I’d also like to the address the idea that if a child has earned an honorable designation like val, or class president, or all-state athlete that that is its own reward and requires no additional recognition. Yes, instrinsically these are achievements independent of any award system. But it’s not exactly like the example someone posted where the lottery winner expects to win the “luckiest person” award too. Everything is about context. If in the context of the awards ceremony, all the top students in the top 3% of the class are supposed to be recognized and you don’t include the Val in the list because he’s already the Val and that should be enough after all!, but you do include the Sal and top 10, then that’s a problem. I think people might be referring to instances like this, and that is certainly one of the issues that happened to D. In the context of the first ceremony, the principal was honoring everyone who received a PSAT-related award (NMF, NM commended, etc.) but did not include D. Yes, she received it and the lack of recognition does not change that fact, but if you’re honoring everyone else and she got the same designation they did, then she needed to be mentioned too.</p>
<p>For the most part I think our senior awards night was fine. Perhaps there are some families disappointed by results, but truly I think all of the students were fortunate to have strong IB and AP courses available and a rich assortment of talented, interesting classmates.</p>
<p>I had only one major gripe. Most departments gave out many awards (Math - one from every teacher; English - 2 per grade; drama - 2 per grade; music - 4 major awards annouced, with dozens more awards and certificates in their own separate ceremony another night). The science department opted to select just one senior because she was “head and shoulders above all others”. Well, that is actually true. My son and some of his friends are outstanding science students, but the winner was even stonger and took all sciences IB/HL. I can justify that single senior award. My gripe was their decision to not name one of more students from the other classes, since that would be helpful on college apps etc. </p>
<p>I did feel a little bad that my son did not make top 5%, despite having same number of B’s as the salutorian. It simply came down to mix of weighed/unweighted classes… my son took 10 semesters of music classes and loved every minute of it (plus many other music endeavors at school and elswewhere). Happily he did receive a big music award (typically given to music majors, not engineers).</p>
<p>One thing I’ve noticed is that awards beget more awards. Sure, most of these high school awards are so small potatoes that they won’t be noticed, but they sure seem to be cumulative. </p>
<p>If anything, being rewarded for diligently applying for an award, with the occasional “cultivation” of friends among the award-givers to give you an edge, can become a lucrative habit.</p>
<p>I knew someone in grad school who was just so good at getting awards and grants. Not that she did anything wrong, but she knew very well how to work the system and get results. She had great social intelligence for that. Better students might look at the application, see that it was 10 pages long and required 3 letters of recommendation, and just give up. </p>
<p>I think awards committees like to see other awards on someone’s resume too. It might make them feel that the person deserved the Fulbright, since they’ve gotten the Rome prize in the past.</p>
<p>Take a deep breathe. In and out, in and out. Don’t you all feel better?</p>
<p>People, this is HS. Petty BS is the currency of HS. If it didn’t have petty and mean-spirited and unfair people, well, it just wouldn’t be HS. And if I weren’t so busy trying to process my crappy HS experience in therapy I’d recall all the movies and plays and novels that have been written about HS. (Just kidding, I’m past HS in therapy.)</p>
<p>Let it go. The time you all spend on the board figuring out who got what and who didn’t get what could be spent taking a walk around the block or making strawberry smoothies with your actual, fantastic, award-deserving HS kid who is about to leave for college and leave their childhood behind. Every calorie you expend worrying about what they didn’t get is energy or time or bandwidth that you’ve wasted on such trivia instead of going and experiencing a moment with your actual kid before he or she slips away.</p>
<p>So stop it already with the athletic awards and band night and who gets what and who holds the stop watch and who resents whom for not being a suck up or for being a suck up. Go find your kid and relish the moment.</p>
<p>Greenwitch is right. And that point helps explain why the same kids get so many awards where there is no overlap of people selecting.</p>
<p>Blossom, I hear you.</p>
<p>I have been thinking about and trying to figure out why I was so bothered by my D not being awarded anything (all four years). I think that now, at the end of senior year, it makes me sad to think that she wasn’t on anyone’s radar. You know, that nobody bothered to SEE her. I know what a great kid she is and I know that she has so many strong qualities and accomplishments she has but it just makes me sad a little bit. I think it has less to do with other kids getting all of the awards and more to do with her being left out. It gives me that same feeling I had when she was excluded from a birthday party when she was little. </p>
<p>Yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s only HS. It’s just that nobody wants to see their kid hurt. Simple as that. And my original beef still stands: I understand the awards and scholarships that are based on objective criteria. But the other ones that are awarded to the granddaughter of the founder or the neighbor of the dean or the kids who mom works in the school office or the character award given to the kid who everyone knows is a bully but who’s father is on the board…those are shameful.</p>
<p>At my school, all 9th and 10th grade GPAs are unweighted. Valedictorian and salutatorian are given to students with the highest and second-highest cumulative weighted GPAs throughout their years in my school (not necessarily 4 years because a student may enroll in 10th,11th grade). </p>
<p>This year, the valedictorian and salutatorian awards were given to students who both attended my school since 10th grade. Because I attended since 9th grade, my unweighted 9th grade GPA was factored into my cumulative weighted GPA. On the other hand, the vale and salu were able to avoid this problem, because their 9th grade GPA (from a different school) was not included. </p>
<p>My 10,11,12th grade cumulative weighted GPA significantly outweighs both vale’s and salu’s cumulative GPA. But just because I attended the school longer, I didn’t become vale or salu. I addressed this problem to the school and they merely said “well, we understand that you were at a disadvantage and we’re sorry… but it’s the rule.”</p>
<p>I was furious when I found out about this! This system does not make sense at all. </p>
<p>Do other schools have a similar problem?</p>
<p>Sounds like “the rule” needs to be changed at your school, dreamihigh91. Perhaps senior parents can send a group letter to the board of education outlining the need for change. That would be a nice gift to future 4-year seniors.</p>
<p>Dreamhigh - That is unfortunate. I think there really is not perfect way to handle weighting, ranking, transfers etc. But for your situation - bummer. It does sound like rule change would be fairer. </p>
<p>In case there are any parents of Class of 2011 reading this… know that Valedictorian and Salutorian are nice honors, but not all that critical for college acceptances. Most schools are looking for students that took hard classes and did very well… but maybe not a perfect GPA. The kids I noticed this year accepted to Harvard and MIT were not Val/Sal (there are several) … so 5th or lower. </p>
<p>I’ve heard about students at other high schoolsdoing crazy to try to ensure being Val, like taking only 4 weighted classes senior year. Crazy.</p>
<p>Senior Dinner wasn’t required but pretty much everyone went while Senior Awards were mandatory for all students…even though they held it at night after Seniors had completed the school year. They held the Senior Dinner and the Senior Awards on the same night. Okay, so far so good, only one night off from work. Senior Dinner starts at 5:30 in the middle school gym (my HS is “downtown”, so space is limited for something like setting up tables and serving 150 kids and their families). They then decide to hold Senior Awards at the High School immediately following the dinner. So everyone had to drive to the high school, fight hard for a parking spot (again, limited space…so limited parking), and cram inside the auditorium. Why didn’t they just hold the awards in the same spot as the dinner? Good question. First, they individually call 150 Seniors’ names and announce the name of the college the Senior is attending (or, oddly, one girl who’s “seeking employment in the work field” and another whose plan is “undecided”–plus the two gap year kids) plus the scholarships they are getting, which I think was in very, very bad taste. We had multiple kids going to one local university. I remember one instance where a kid got called “John Smith will be attending Jane Doe University and has received the Trustees’ Scholarship, the President’s Award, and the Leadership Scholarship” and then the very next kid got called “Jane Rogers will be attending Jane Doe University”. Obviously a variation in the structure of financial aid packages is going to come down to a lot of factors (Jane may have been on a lot of need-based aid while John didn’t qualify and was given a lot of merit aid, etc…), but that’s not how it came off during the dreadfully long reading; one student was given more merit awards so they must be the better student. Then came the awards. The obvious complaint is length. It took 2 hours plus the ninety minutes spent on dinner. Almost four hours. Every representative had full reign to talk for as long as they wanted. We got the Garden Club lady who decided her $250 horticulture scholarship gave her the right to bore the entire room to tears for 10 minutes and the very confused Order of the Purple Heart rep who seemed like a cool guy but rambled incoherently for what felt like an hour about a old buddy who went into teaching after the service and wanted more kids to go into teaching…only to award a student who wasn’t at the MANDATORY event. Then the whole “the John P. Smith Scholarship is awarded based on academic merit and demonstrated significant financial need and it goes to Jane Rogers!” I’m sure Jane’s parents wanted it advertised to the whole town that they have “significant financial need”. That’s nobody’s business. The only thing that was really worth seeing the whole night were the maybe 20 minutes of awards for the Val, Sal, and “Bronze Award”, as those kids all deserved it, and the departmental awards, which, disappointingly, were few and far between compared to the small local scholarships which most kids didn’t apply for (I had no idea we had so many awards that either A) only go to kids going into the “medical field”, B) only go to future teachers, or C) only go to women…that are only going into one of these fields) and probably could have gone without the 2 hours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad all of those kids got recognition, but the ceremony was very disappointing. Here’s hoping Commencement is a little bit better. /rambling incoherent rant</p>
<p>^hahahahaha tl;dr</p>
<p>
It’s the exact opposite at my school. Any weighted classes you took before moving into the district don’t get any weight at all. So if you moved to my district with a 90 in APUSH that was really a 99 after the weight, you wouldn’t get the weight while the student who took APUSH in the district and got the same exact grade would. It’s very silly. I think the whole issue class rank makes for lazy admissions counselors and ends up shutting a lot of kids at small, high achieving schools out of the competitive pool (the top 20% at my high school would crush the top 10% at a neighboring school, but that doesn’t mean anything for the admissions process) and I think it’s great that it’s dying a slow, but well-deserved, death, but that’s just me.</p>
<p>All of this talk makes me feel both grateful and guilty, I guess, that my D’s high school was nothing similar. I’ve already explained how that school handled awards; no need to repeat. The only time politics entered in was over NHS selections, and, as is well known on CC, politics often plays a heavy part in those appointments.</p>
<p>…The point being that when politics does play a significant part in not recognizing accomplishment but recognizing something else, this becomes rather cynical common knowledge – among students, among parents. If (although I agree with calmom that we do not know the reasons for all awards) these awards are truly empty or inappropriate, is not the point that the events will lose credibility, even universally? If they’re really laughable and ridiculous, they will be privately but widely laughed at and ridiculed. </p>
<p>In matters non-quantifiable, it seems to me that value is based on perception. Forgetting about parents for a moment, most student bodies are real enough to respect genuinely those among them who have genuine worth – whether or not adults are astute enough to share that perception, or observant enough to have noticed, or wise enough to reward that publicly. Over four years, students have already been “giving out” their invisible awards to each other. They know who’s truly the best student, not just the person with the best gpa; the person who’s the best team player in any group activity (not just sports); the person who is most generous toward other students with his or talent, regardless of whether that generosity earns points or is formally recognized. This happened possibly to be more true at the school of my 2 D’s than at some other schools here, but it’s true at many schools. Kids are really good at spotting phony awards. </p>
<p>In the previous school my Ds attended, often the students recognized were merely progeny of fave parents or families. Those families happened to be ones that my own family did not value much; their children were usually mediocre students or worse; they did not distinguish themselves in academics or in outside activities. The school was very socially cliquey among adults, with a lot of mutual back-scratching in various kinds of ‘recognitions’ (usually privileges & opportunities, not awards) throughout the year. (There was no ‘award night’ per se.) The students with real personal and academic qualities were rarely or never recognized. And this was widely known among school families whom we personally valued. IOW, Consider the Source. We wouldn’t have considered it much of an honor to be bestowed with anything. D1 was Val of her class; D2 was Sal of hers. It didn’t occur to me until later that the reason those others were habitually “recognized” was that there weren’t going to be any genuine recognitions, so this was a way for adults who were the Movers & Shakers at school to feel better about their underperforming children, and possibly to thumb their noses at excellence. (Translation: Envy) In some schools, despite supposedly being “better” schools, there is an anti-academic sub-text which competes and sometimes controls the agenda.</p>
<p>Long story short: Some mysterious awards are for qualities that are not apparent to all outsiders (what calmom has been trying to say); other awards may be compensations for “sweeps” predicted for others – which doesn’t necessarily mean they are phony or empty, just an opportunity to spread the celebration around; and some awards are political favors (unfortunately). Know that any students who are not jaded will value recognitions for others whom they also value. Know also that in private moments parents who are not political will honestly reveal their opinions, and share their congratulations, with those who are truly deserving.</p>
<p>Isn’t this, combined with your own knowledge of your students’ comparative strengths, enough? Let the school have its quasi-worthwhile ceremony, if that’s what it is. It has no power over you unless you let it have. If these events are so outrageously unjust, my revenge would be to gang up with others who felt similarly, and make audible remarks, leading up to the event, about how little credibility we placed in them. Maybe also to look very bored and disengaged during it. But to accept some assigned value or lack of value that someone or ones bestows on my daughter? I don’t think so. I would hope that we all have been way too busy communicating counter messages to our children. I know I have.</p>
<p>Do other schools have a similar problem? >></p>
<p>My DD went to a new school for 12th grade when we moved. The new school did not weight grades and did not recalculate the grades from her old school, which had a different grading scale. She was not in the the top 10% because of two courses taken in 11th grade in which she got B+'s (93’s); those courses weren’t even offered at the new school. She also got a B in college calculus her senior year. Those three grades were enough to keep her out, even though she was one of those who had taken the hardest classes. </p>
<p>So it also works in reverse of your situation. </p>
<p>She got her college acceptances weeks before higher ranked kids did, and I am sure it is partly because of her courseload in comparison.</p>
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<p>This really strikes me as yet another reason that these awards should potentially be given on more intangible qualities and reach beyond just re-rewarding the sal / team captain / state qualifier / etc. Recognize kids beyond just those who have already won the hs popularity contests.</p>
<p>After all, in the work world, every team I’ve worked with always recognized other things about people. It wasn’t just the “who made most sales this month” (the easily quantifiable objective), it was who went out of their way to help people, who demonstrated positive points of view, who helped teach / facilitate others’ growth, who went above and beyond the call of duty in a situation they didn’t have to, etc.</p>
<p>Isn’t it far better to find the person on the team who really demonstrated great sportsmanlike conduct in a given situation, who really cheered others on, who did something intangible, than to re-reward the team captains and state qualifiers for being team captains and state qualifiers? </p>
<p>I don’t get the reluctance to “share the wealth,” so to speak. </p>
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<p>Brava. You all haven’t taught your children that this is only hs, you’ll never see the majority of these people again, and “success” in hs (which usually means popularity contest) has nothing to do with success in life? That getting to the college of your choice is what counts, and that hs is only the means to the end? I sure have.</p>
<p>"Brava. You all haven’t taught your children that this is only hs, you’ll never see the majority of these people again, and “success” in hs (which usually means popularity contest) has nothing to do with success in life? That getting to the college of your choice is what counts, and that hs is only the means to the end? I sure have. "</p>
<p>Correct. I would go further though. Getting to the college of your choice is not as important as to be successful at the college that one ends up going. All frustrated and dissapointed, please, tell your kids to leave all these HS crap behind and focus on what is ahead, even if college was not #1 on the list. Workde perfectly for my own D. at her #2, because the only thing that’s important at college is working hard. Do not be stuck in any negative situation, erase memory of it, look positive to the future, even if it is not your dream school, it will work. Attitude makes difference, hard work is everything even if you feel it was not awarded, actually it was - knowledge, background is in kid’s head nobody can take it away.</p>