Dear editor:

This letter is in response to the Nov. 3 article about “New Grading Guidelines” in our high school.

Recently we watched a video of a young Gen Z woman who was very upset because her 9-5 job didn’t allow her any time to have any fun in her life. All she does is go to work, come home, order food and go to bed. She doesn’t say how much time she spends on social media while she is at work or at home. Like many young adults she is blaming her job for making her miserable. How much real responsibility has she avoided in her life?

Something like the new grading guidelines will create another generation that takes no responsibility for their actions. We have no problem with a student being given a chance to improve their grade but there should never be multiple do-overs. That is not how the world works.

The” tiered system of intervention” just gives the student more time to waste and makes any teacher who is with that student more responsible for getting it done than the student is. This is not encouragement, this is letting a student skate through school and eventually through life.

The following questions should be asked:

1. How many assignments will a student be allowed to procrastinate on before it is too many?

2. If a student is allowed to have so much extra time to get it done, what about the students who performed correctly? Do they get extra credit for doing what was asked of them in the original allotted time?

3. When a student does not complete the assignment after going through the three tiers does that student get another do-over on that assignment?

4. If you want quality work, who judges that?

5. Why are so many students failing to begin with? The article quotes a 40%-50% failure rate. This is an appalling statistic by any measure whether it is for one class or more.

6. Will finals or standardized tests have do-overs?

Education is very important but the system has turned it into a game to allow those who don’t want to learn get by with a diploma they don’t deserve. Or, the system makes reading, writing, math and history the least important things in the curriculum they present to their students.

There will always be students who don’t do well in school either because of a learning disability or a physical or emotional problem that makes life difficult. We will always strive to accommodate them but not to the detriment of those who are actually attempting to do the work.

The schools no longer seem to challenge their students; they just shove them along until they are able to graduate or drop out. Few students are ready for the real world when they graduate. That goes for both high school and college. They’ve never had to take responsibility for anything because failure is an option in our world today. While the “new grading system” recognizes the symptom it fails to address the disease.

Linda and Bob Graff  

Powell