Comment by taeric
I find your statistic mistake rather amusing in light of the point you are making. :D
Distributions aren't all normal, for one. And skill levels are often quantized in a way that majority of people will be above a 50% level on it.
I find your statistic mistake rather amusing in light of the point you are making. :D
Distributions aren't all normal, for one. And skill levels are often quantized in a way that majority of people will be above a 50% level on it.
Ish? Even the common usage of "middle" doesn't necessarily describe where the average student is with regards to any skill they are learning in school. You can argue that we are using a common usage of "average" here, akin to how many fingers does the average human have. But, in a discussion on education, I confess leaning to pedantry seems rather apropos?
My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
> My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
The point isn't that average is bad, it's that your kid probably isn't exactly average.
You could also want to home school them if they're below average, to keep them from getting left behind. The way a lot of public schools treat kids with developmental disabilities is sadly a lot like the way corporations treat cost centers.
> It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
Everyone thinks they're above average. Around half of them are right.
I have yet to see this line pushed by anyone that doesn't view dysfunctional classrooms as indicative of what the average student would do. So, fair that I am maybe letting my experience there color my thoughts here.
And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of homeschooling not being an automatic terrible thing. Sold a Story went a long way to convincing me that some really bad choices were made in how to teach reading.
My main nitpick is that that wity quip at the end is not even wrong. Not all values are population weighted, such that you can certainly have some skills where over half of the population is over what you would call average ability.
You're being pedantic. Average in common usage means "middle" as much as "arithmetic mean", and it doesn't really matter to the point whether the mean is above or below the median because all that is necessary to the point is for the 50th percentile to be below the 90th.