My class is the guinea pig - Opinions on this new form of teaching?

sounds extremely stupid and pressuring students to pressure slackers can result in aggressiveness to increase in students.

And call you by your numbers? When did education become a concentration camp? This by far the stupidest approach to maintain equality, equality is IMPOSSIBLE to obtain there will always be a hierarchy, that’s how nature functions, and thus man as well.

I hope the council is at least voted by the students in the class, and not random.

Personally I think classes should be based on student ability/desire. All the students who can do a higher level of education do so in classes designed for them, moderate students in classes designed for them, and underachievers in classes design for tthem, and students who are struggling can be put in classes designed for them. That what a former principal of mine instituted at my old high school, and he got fired for it, which I think is complete and utter bullshit, to hell with what they call equality, lowering the standard to work for everyone is destructive.

This is a lit class? Are you reading Orwell or Huxley? This sounds like a set up to learn about authoritarianism and perhaps dictatorships. As an experiment, it sounds potentially dangerous. Is this high school? College? Organizations run this way can get very authoritarian. People can start to take the game way too seriously.

Essentially, it is human subjects research, only without any oversight to make sure kids don’t get hurt. I hope the teachers monitor this very carefully.

I trust this is only one class out of several in a day. So people can get away from it before it gets out of hand. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some seriously deep shit happens.

This was done years ago by a class to see how Hitler gained control over the german people. You are going to find that there will be some in the class that will be looked at as the high/good ones and others not so good. It shouldn’t be done in my opinion.

Sounds like a particularly disturbing episode of The Prisoner to me. “I’m not a number, i’m a free man!”

@Winters-
I agree with everything – just to clarify, my class is for honors, and my teacher claims that a student can have a name that’s better than another’s name, which we all protested…? That claim makes little sense to me. So now we all have numbers, but people do have favorite numbers, so….

@wundayatta -
This is a ninth grade English Honors class. We just started reading the novel Anthem, by Ayn Rand, and will be doing Shakespeare later this year (Romeo and Juliet). We also recently finished a Chinese communism novel on the infamous 1980’s firing on the college students, I can’t remember what it’s called.

There are no enemies in my classroom; we are all highly intelligent. And yes, this is one period out of the 8 in my school day.

To add to what @Summum said, you will probably see a group of students who are picked on and blamed for everything that goes wrong. The animosity towards this group will get increasingly strong. Also, you will find people trying to secretly curry favor with the council by reporting on/denouncing others.

I wonder whose idea this is. It does not sound like they have really thought it through very well. It sounds like a character or two in this drama are missing. Maybe they’ll be sprung on you later. A ruler of some sort. Or you’ll be divided into “teams” that have different responsibilities. One team will be given way too much to do.

@babybadger No enemies yet. The point of the exercise is to show how fast a set of social rules can break people apart. Let us know how it goes. Maybe you’ll come up with a way to stop it from going to its inevitable end.

Tienanmen Square. Was that back in the 80s already? Seems like it can’t have been that long ago.

@wundayatta – Perhaps there will be more rules – this is a general overview of what my teacher told us, to many objections. I really appreciate you opinions, thank you!!

And yes, the 80’s. I’ll let you know…thanks a lot :)

Well you ask for an opinion and you know what they say about those….

Sounds like the Borg collective method of teaching to me. IMHO, this might be a fun experiment for a class or two, but definitely not method to base the whole semester on.

(Bottom line is that it sounds like a bunch of new age horse shit to me)

The thing I’m most worried about is the grading…to be honest I’m a tremendous overachiever, and I will NOT be happy if my grade goes down because of this.

Be wary of doing everyone else’s work so you can get a good grade.

That’s the one thing I’ll have to battle…. Hopefully I won’t have to resort to pleading or threats to make sure everyone gets it done ahaa.

@babybadger My daughter hates assignments where you get a grade as a group. She claims that no one else cares, and they knew she’ll do the work, if they don’t. Like she doesn’t have enough stress in her life.

It turns out her teacher is aware of the dynamic in these groups, and that even though everyone gets the same grade officially, its effect on your overall grade is a different story. As you will find in this exercise, people don’t play fair. I think you’ll have a difficult time with that. Be prepared to cheat. Do not assume good will. Your classmates may all be friendly now, but that could easily change. Of course, that will be one of the lessons they want to teach you.

Thank you.

This sounds like nazi school. My opinion is as low as it can get.

Hahaha, sounds like a dictatorship. I personally think it would be interesting. Are you sure a 9th grade class would really get the concept of this though?

I think we would. In reflecting, we always bounce ideas off each other…there are a few obnoxious people in my class, but they are smart. We usually grasp the concepts our teacher puts in front of us….We’re using an 11th grade textbook, if that helps.

Loss of all individuality, with everyone working towards a common good. It has the same theoretical advantages of communism, but the same practical flaws.

Under the new system, the moment a child realizes that not participating won’t hurt their grade that much, since everyone else helps to keep that child’s grade up, they will stop participating. Since it’s part of human nature to be lazy when you can, nobody would want to do the work and they all would stop doing the work. No child would want to be the one child that is doing the work. Since nobody else is working, the class grade will be low anyway, and no matter how much effort a single child puts out, there would be little to no reward for his effort. That one child could just stop working, and the gain from no work will easily outweigh the slight drop in grade.

Under the new system, the vast majority of a students grade is based off of the work of other people. Why would you work for a grade when your personal work, or lack thereof, hardly makes a dent in your final grade?

The system is doomed to collapse. No one would do anything, since doing the work won’t generate a reward. The only way the class system (and true communism) could possibly have any hope of working is if every single student in the entire class is an overacheiver that is willing to work for a their grade, even when the majority of the grade is out of their control.

Studies have shown that students perform better in smaller schools. This is partially due to the fact that being in a large school causes students to feel like they lose their individaulity (they feel like they are just part of a giant machine). If just the loss of individuality is large enough to cause a grade drop, imagine what will happen in your class. “Names do not exist, students are just numbers.” This rule, by itself, absolutely crushes any sense of individuality in the class room. Every student wants to feel special or unique, and this rule is like saying “you’re so normal and non-unique, you don’t even get to be called by your real name, instead you shall be called the number 15 from now on. It’s descriptive enough.”

I do not support this method of teaching, and I believe that it will have negative effects on the student’s work ethic and grades in the class, and as well as outside of it.

@babybadger Ahhh, well in that case, sounds good. The kids might be kind of shocked, but I think if they are more mature for their age that it will work out well.

I see absolutely no benefits to this unless it is to demonstrate why it is not a good idea.

Sounds rather orwellian to me.

Okay, I can see where this is going. Replace names with numbers, so that any sort of bias or prejudice on the part of the teacher is eliminated. This doesn’t exactly work, because teachers can recognize writing styles and will learn what number goes with whom. The point of the grade for the class as a whole is for the overachievers to motivate or bully the slackers into doing better. I have never seen positive influence in group project work because slacking off is more fun, so perhaps the intent is to make the good student militant about grades.

Ask the teacher if there is a name for this instructional method, and report back! This sounds interesting. Somewhere out there is a white paper on this.