01/15/2014

I wonder if all that artificial power has gone to Victor’s head or is this just part of being a Von Fogg?

Veritas
01/17/2014, 10:42 pm
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Given some of his family’s exploits (like that airship-nation of theirs), I rather suspect it’s all the same mindset, just with different levels of power available. Same with the stuff he got up to with full power, however much he might have thought it inappropriate; it was just leaving his mark on the universe on a grander scale.

It may be bigger and fancier than most graffiti, but it amounts to much the same thing…

dains

01/16/2014, 7:57 pm

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…. I have the urge to take notes on Von Fogg’s management style.

Partigal

01/16/2014, 8:11 pm

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I hate to say it, but this kids got his priorities straight.

BananaManDan
01/16/2014, 9:20 pm
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Yeah– he seems all nice now– but wait until he cuts ‘parachute day’ from P.E.

Xel Unknown

01/17/2014, 12:11 am

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I do have to agree… Love the Von Fogg priorities here. Wanting to first focus on getting his minions minds better off then work on making them stuff. Neato.

Unmaker

01/17/2014, 2:36 pm

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The trouble is that Victor is targeting the wrong audience for educational improvements. Parents are the primary motivators for their children. Without properly motivated students, coercing the local school board, politicians, and/or school administrators will not show significant gains.

Steven Steampunkboy

01/17/2014, 2:50 pm

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Right now I would VOTE for Von Fogg for President…… ANd about coercing the uppers in school/county/state admin about popping grades….. Most parents only see thier kids for 2-3 hours a day, tops. The schopol system has them for 6-9 hours a day…. That crap about its all up to the parents is just that crap. Great Schools have proven again and again to out score bad schools by over 2 grade levels….

rmsgrey
01/18/2014, 12:41 pm
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Unless you’re doing something unusual with the local education system, then the fact that certain schools consistently perform better isn’t evidence that the school is significant. What it shows is that the schools which the better parents get their kids into end up with better results. That could be the school, or it could be the kids and their parents…

When it comes to contact hours, say that schools do have 5 times as many hours per year (a significant overapproximation – if you have school 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year, then that’s only 4 days out of every 7 – call it 10 hours a day when they’re in school, and give parents only 2 hours a day but every day, and it’s only three times as many hours in school as with parents) – then with one teacher for a class of (assuming a highly selective school with good staffing levels) 20, you get the same amount of attention per child as with a single-parent with 4 kids.

The school is a significant factor, but it’s far from the only factor – if you have two kids at the same school, the kids themselves and the parents are the biggest remaining factors determining how well they’ll do.

For example: if one kid’s parents enforce a rule of “no TV and no video-games until homework is done” while another kid’s parents come in and physically threaten the teachers if they try to penalise the kid for not having done his homework (which does happen), then guess which kid’s going to get better exam results?

And then there are schools which consistently score higher than you’d expect because the students receive… special targeted assistance – and with computers, they don’t even need to copy it out in their own handwriting…
1. Tgape
  
  01/19/2022, 12:57 am
  
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  “Which kid’s going to get the better exam results?”
  
  Why would we care about that?
  
  Which kid will be prepared better for life? Which kid will do better in college if neither set of parents threaten or bribe the college or its faculty? Oh, wait, of course they will, so forget that one. It goes back to “Which kid will be prepared better for life?” Grades are only a tool, and a poor one at that, even before being compromised by threats from parents.
  
  The people I know who have tended to do best in life came from schools that wrote evaluations of their students, rather than just letter grades. Some of them had letter grades, some of them didn’t. What mattered was their teachers took the time to not just say how the student did in the subject overall, but what aspects of the subject were hardest for them, and thus where they needed to focus the most on improving.
  
  It might seem like the student could figure that out on their own. But my high school just gave letter grades. I got As in math, so I was doing good, right? I didn’t particularly need to work on anything there?
  
  Someone else I knew went to a high school that both evaluated and gave letter grades. They also got As, but their math teachers also pointed out the exact parts of math where they were still weak, having analyzed what they got wrong over the course of each semester and identified what bits tended to be more of a problem. They were quite a bit better at math than I was, despite the fact that I’d first started doing algebra in the fourth grade and they struggled with it in the eighth grade.
  
  Yeah, those schools still turn out a bunch of students that don’t do spectacularly. Giving that level of information only really helps if the student actually makes use of it.
  
  Also, yes, I understand that a lot of people who get through high school either by cheating themselves or due to their parents cheating for them tend to cheat their way through life, because it’s the only way they can. That doesn’t mean I don’t prefer schools that provide people that want them better options.