So - is school just to teach academics, or is the schools' role to prepare a child for the outside world and life skills they need for college and beyond? Skills like managing time, organizing themselves, responsibility, leadership, team work and so on... seem to be increasingly more and more emphasized in classrooms and grades than pure mastery
I would say that it's not a schools job to conflate organization and time management skills with traditional academic subjects like math and history. If the schools want to grade students on such skills, create a separate category for it.
As it is schools are injecting too much English into math class with the common core curriculum.
ITA.
Important skills, to be sure-- but often an area of great (and hidden!) asynchrony for gifted students, too, this creep of multiple skills into curricular domains where they don't naturally occur.
Where and to what extent they naturally occur, fine. Good, even. Make high school students write lab reports. By all means. But don't make them write an essay about their geometry proof. Oh. Wait-- that's right. Proofs are things that students
observe now, rather than construct for themselves... since it takes too long to produce something, evidently.
