I'm conducting some consultations of my own!

[sabotabby]

Poll #21632 A poll, for science

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42

View Respondents

I loved group work in high school and I learned a lot from it.

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Yes
3 (7.1%)

No
39 (92.9%)

I wish there had been more students in my classes when I was in high school

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Yes
2 (4.9%)

No
39 (95.1%)

I wish I'd had fewer choices in courses (e.g., arts, music, technology, languages) when I was in high school

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Yes, there were way too many choices
1 (2.4%)

No, there was not enough choice
40 (97.6%)

Children learn best if there aren't enough chairs for them in a class

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Yes
1 (2.4%)

No
40 (97.6%)

Teenagers build resiliency through suffering

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No, are you joking?
17 (40.5%)

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE
25 (59.5%)

Which is hardest?

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Running the Ministry of Education
0 (0.0%)

Running a goat farm
3 (7.1%)

Running a class of 40 teenagers with diverse learning needs
39 (92.9%)

<input ... >

Larger class sizes will make high school students more resilient, according to Education Minister Lisa Thompson, in the least coherent interview ever given.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

Sorry, I can't pick any option OTHER than blood for the blood god.

Look when I was a kid, we didn't have all these fancy "special needs" or "teacher interactions". We self-medicated with alcohol to fill the abyss inside our hearts and souls like Real Men. And that's what kids today need. Buck-a-beers and suffering.

[sabotabby]

The kids with learning differences just dropped out or committed suicide. The blood god was sated, back then!

[notasupervillain]

Skulls don't put themselves on the skull throne. Need lots of people with no skills for the knowledge economy to work on collecting those.

[franklanguage]

By the way, who was the skull throne for?

[sabotabby]

Me. Personal reasons.

[dragonlady7]

ah you threw your results off because no one can resist BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, sorry

[sabotabby]

I almost didn't put that because I knew what would happen, but I can't resist BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD either.

[notasupervillain]

Neither can the blood God.

[gingicat]

I should say that about a third of the group projects I participated in were awesome.

[notasupervillain]

You are what we in the business call "An Outlier", aka "Spiders Goerge"

[gingicat]

I also didn't consider it to be an excuse to vote for group projects as a general rule.

[sabotabby]

I remember three. One involved dramatizing a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream where we interpreted the "I am your spaniel" bit as a BDSM scene, one was supposed to be dramatizing a scene from Sam Sheppard's Action, but we liked the play so much that we did the whole thing, and I got to smash a chair, and one was a World History presentation where we all dressed in red and black and blasted the Internationale. But...three projects over 18 years of education.

[moon_custafer]

I see few of us could resist the all-caps choice.

[sabotabby]

You are all weak and will be sacrificed to the BLOOD GOD.

[rdi]

I hope the Minister and all other member of the Tory caucus will be putting any children of their own through the same pain as everyone else's kids, and encouraging their families to do the same.

[sabotabby]

Are you kidding? Public school is for the plebes; they'll send their kids to UCC and Havergal with class sizes of 16.

[dagibbs]

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!

[sabotabby]

SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!!

[smhwpf]

I fear the main takeaway the OPA will take from this is BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

I can't remember ever having had a group project at school, so I guess that still makes me a no.

[sabotabby]

I mean

you know they were already thinking it.

How did you manage to get away with never having group projects? We had so many.

[smilingslightly]

..I always preferred to sit on the floor. Or slink away and hide under a table.

so.

In conclusion, SUFFERING DIDN'T DO ME NO HARM, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL GOD

[sabotabby]

I had one class where we sat on the floor but we all arranged it so that we could work wherever (I was generally in the coffee shop) and only come and sit on the floor once a week. I wonder if there was no furniture in that room on purpose.

School was different then. We went to protests and drank wine with our teachers.

[rinue]

I skipped the "more or fewer choices" question because I had about the right amount of choices. I think I would have been overwhelmed by having many more options than I had (would have felt buyer's remorse, opportunity cost) but I liked having the options I did have (like advanced anatomy and a short story course and some very complex music theory). There is a point at which I like having options and there is another point at which I don't like having to stress over a course catalog.

[rinue]

Incidentally, I'm the (at this point solo) "loved group work" person, because I went to peforming art schools and am a director. Freshman year I had people do indoor bike stunts as a report on the paintings of Rene Magritte. EVERYONE SHOULD OFFER ME MORE GROUP WORK (and also possibly control of the Canadian school system).

[sabotabby]

See, I bet if I'd done a group project with you, I wouldn't have had to do all the work! Collaboration is great; we typically got assigned things that could have been done individually and were ultimately done individually. When there was something that needed to be done in groups, like theatre, I was cool with it.

[conuly]

Larger class sizes will make high school students more resilient, according to Education Minister Lisa Thompson, in the least coherent interview ever given.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and we have always been at war with Eurasia.

[sabotabby]

It's time for our Two Minutes Hate.

[franklanguage]

Only two minutes?

[sabotabby]

It’s traditional.

[minoanmiss]

"Whatever doesn't kill me. makes me stronger" is such a lie. It's more like "Whatever doesn't kill me leaves me with scars and less energy to deal with the next thing." Ugh.

[rdi]

"...and still hurts like hell while it's happening."

[sabotabby]

Yeah, what didn't kill me gave me chronic pain and an inability to lift more than ten pounds or bend over multiple times in a day.

[sara]

To be fair, suffering in high school did help prepare me for the abusive marriage I escaped when I was forty.

[sabotabby]

Oh wow. Glad you escaped, but that is...not the experience I would want for anyone.

[minimalistpolygeek]

> I loved group work in high school and I learned a lot from it.

Love is a strong word...

Oh, and goats are the worst.

[sabotabby]

I don't have any interaction with goats. I bet you don't need to make their work, though.

[lapinlunaire]

I've met goats. They are animals and are therefore easier to handle then teenagers*. FACT.

Also, working with special needs kids is extremely hard work and I congratulate anyone who can do it.

* The exception to this might be teenage chimpazees. You can tell we're closely related.

[ironed_orchid]

I have done a few group projects i didn't completely hate.

[sabotabby]

I've done a few, and I can think of some circumstances where it's not a bad idea. But even as a teacher, I can see how much of a mess it is to have kids dependent on each other for grades in a competitive system.

[lapinlunaire]

I had to pick blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne. I suspect this is not what they mean by resiliency. The blood god is not appeased by high school students dying due to poor choices by the adults around them. Also, I think teenagers have small heads so that's a crappy skull throne.

[sabotabby]

It's true. The best skulls for the skull throne come from politicians with swollen egos.

[lapinlunaire]

Those are excellent-quality skulls for throne-making. I think skull thrones are great but you really have to have standards, you know? This is not like other furniture where you can just get stuff from IKEA

[sabotabby]

It's true. IKEA has a really limited selection of SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE.

[lapinlunaire]

And group projects are the worst, kill it with fire. 99% of the time I got stuck with incompetent or shitty people and if I hadn't, the experience of having to work with a neo-Nazi classmate was enough to make me against group work forever

[sabotabby]

I still can't believe you had to work with that shithead.

[lapinlunaire]

Right?! I can't believe it either.

Most other group projects I worked on sucked too. My favourite was when teachers told students who had trouble with their group to work it out themselves. Because kids, especially younger ones, are GREAT at conflict resolution! Or whenever your grade was on the line if someone else didn't work, so if you wanted a good grade you had to do extra work to make up for lazy classmates (there was always at least one per group). This is what I don't get. People deal with these things as adults, yeah, but it's still stressful and upsetting to them. There's no reason to expect kids to handle this better.

[sabotabby]

This was also my life.