Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Teacher telling class individual students' grades

http://gcq.sagepub.com/content/34/3/111.short
so that article was from 1990, but when I first read it, I though, yup, that reflects my memory of my personal experience.

I would share with the teacher that you, the parent, prefer that your child not be publicly identified for her test scores. You don't have to explain why, but you can say that you are getting social pressure from the other parents and you don't like it.

Remember what the companies say about the numbers of letters they get about their products, that each person who comments represents hundreds who feel the same but don't comment.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Another problem is that you view superiors in the company hierarchy as threats because the goal is to become CEO as fast as possible and those people are in your way.

There is healthy competition, and there is unhealthy competition. This is what I was trying (and failing) to say in my last post.

I took a really tough chem exam once. Everyone, including me, walked out of class with our brains dripping out our ears. We all thought we failed. When Mr. D. handed back the tests, I saw that I got an A. It turned out that I got a tough 20-point problem correct. I had made an educated guess on how to start it and then followed through logically. The grader wrote VERY, VERY GOOD!!! on my paper.

Everyone else actually did bomb the test. I turned my paper over and refused to discuss it with anyone after class.

IMO, posting my grade publicly or telling everyone that I got an A would have just added to everyone else's misery and may have made them resent me. Why would I want to do that? It wouldn't have accomplished anything positive.

I've held leadership positions at work for a long time now. IMO, if you want to be a good leader, you can't always be competing to be the top dog. If you do, you end up being a bad leader because you tell people that you don't care about them, and the example you set is to look out for yourself and not for anyone else or the organization's goals. This lesson is taught in school.

I'm reminded of something Iucounu said in another thread:


IMO, this is a better way to go.

Sure, maybe there's a correlation between competition and gender, but that doesn't mean that someone should blindly accept uber-competing as being okay because it's part of being male. Humans are intelligent enough to know that we can analyze our behaviors and consider the idea that an approach that feels good personally may not be the best one generally.

I once physically attacked someone for being an academic threat, so that's always something to watch out for.

I had a very similar experience with an advanced materials engineering class - I had a 95, and class ave was a 45 (and the professor pointed out that it would have been quite a few points lower if my score was not counted - but he did not disclose my identity). The professor was pissed about the results of that exam, too, and pretty much reamed out the whole class when he handed it back.

I am a competitive person, and I was very worried about having my identity disclosed. I begged the TA to please not tell anyone (which really surprised my boyfriend).

I appreciate all the thoughts on this. Keep them coming.

It may give you an idea of our teacher situation this year when I say that this was actually near the bottom of my list of current concerns. (Most of which have nothing to do with level of challenge, btw.)

Intimidation purposes and to explain that you *did* consider yourself superior to them and that this simply reinforced it?

Yes, I am aware that my approach to life back in the day was completely insane and non-productive.

Is there any wonder why I have absolutely no leadership skills?

Thinking to another thread here about posted behavior levels causing anxiety... I remember grades being announced in school more as a form of shame-based manipulation than almost anything else. By high school there were many curve teachers who posted all the grades by way of showing the distributions. By third grade I had mostly checked out of grades as being relevant to anything.

Did you really believe that you were superior to them, or were you just trying to prove it to yourself?

I think it was more that I had no identity except that I was superior (read more intelligent) to others, so it was pretty much my core identity at that time (in school). I used my intelligence like a sledgehammer.

My father was always annoyed that I thought I was better than other people, although he helped to create that in the first place.

I discarded that identity, but never replaced it with anything else. Life as competition really doesn't work in the adult world since there really isn't anything to "win" anymore.