{"id":238,"date":"2010-06-27T17:02:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T22:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/?p=238"},"modified":"2010-06-27T17:51:07","modified_gmt":"2010-06-27T22:51:07","slug":"238","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/?p=238","title":{"rendered":"How Many Graduates Does It Take to Be No. 1?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article<\/a> in the NYTimes today (6\/27\/10) reports that many high schools have given up on trying to determine who is the class valedictorian and simple give that designation to every student in the class who has a 4.0 GPA or the equivalent, resulting in many valedictorians every year. Each of them can honestly claim to be class valedictorian. Sounds pretty stupid to me, as I expressed in the following two NYTimes Comments:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have not lowered the bar to achieve more valedictorians,\u201d he said. \u201cMore kids now are getting over the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like as long as you reach that point, it doesn\u2019t matter how many you have,\u201d said Yvette Leung, one of the Jericho seven, who is bound for Harvard. \u201cTo be named valedictorian is an honor and a testament to how hard we\u2019ve tried.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

First Comment (#173 NYTimes):\u00a0
\nWith due respect, the preceding quotes from the NYTimes article indicate a rather pathetic sort of \u201cvaledictorian\u201d or \u201cvaledictorians.\u201d At one point, I felt that students had been taught (i.e., rewarded) to complain, and so were complaining about their grades when they received Bs or lower. But then my institution announced how talented our incoming class was, with an average GPA of 3.8. Now I\u2019m taking an alternate explanation. They are simply clueless about this, and it appears that they have acquired this gross misconception from their high school institutions. The writing skills of some students I see are atrocious. With so many valedictorians, I\u2019m concerned for the few genuinely very bright students. There IS a difference\u2026I have seen it. Simply put, for whatever reason, we are not all born equal or near equal in this respect. A few, a VERY few, absolutely amaze me. They do exist, and they are distinguishable. I hope they can be identified out of all this mindless noise.<\/p>\n

I heartily dislike the notion of standardized testing, but we have brought this on ourselves by our personal weakness and laziness. Yes, we\u2019ll teach to the test, but just be sure the test emphasizes language skills, computational skills, and logical thinking (indeed, the latter can be measured, to an extent, and some folks are sadly lacking here).<\/p>\n

Second Comment (#211 NYTimes):
\nI can readily accept that some of the \u201cvaledictorians\u201d referred to in this article and by Commentators #24 and #154 are extraordinarily bright students, having met some of this sort. But what I can also attest to by the fact of direct personal experience is that some whom I have met coming from comparable situations can barely string together a sentence. And that makes the whole concept of “valedictorian” (in the sense that it is described in this NYTimes article) essentially meaningless.<\/p>\n

\u201cForget experience, you lose discrimination. Lose discrimination; you lose life\u2019s only purpose.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Bhagavad-Gita<\/p>\n

Original Article: http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/06\/27\/education\/27valedictorians.html?th&emc=th<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article in the NYTimes today (6\/27\/10) reports that many high schools have given up on trying to determine who is the class valedictorian and simple give that designation to every student in the class who has a 4.0 GPA or the equivalent, resulting in many valedictorians every year. Each of them can honestly claim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}