Allen
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My parents paid me for grades, on an exponential scale, so and A got me 16 times as much money as a D and almost twice as much (16/9) as a B. this involved delayed gratification, but only by a quarter, 3 months or so, and gave me real rest during the summer rather than summer jobs, my first boat and my first car, which soon taught me mechanics, and changed my major from biology (overpopulation) to mechanical engineering.
Kids can't be expected to delay gratification all the way to adulthood. Few kids can do that and cannot envision themselves as full adults, just as teens and maybe college students, when some have cars and some don't.
And studious kids make real sacrifices as they are seen by their peers as nerds and teacher's pets, so they must accept being bullied in order to study, and the rewards must exceed that sacrifice. Never forget that it is the school attendance system that is forcing kids into proximity with bullies, so schools enable bullies hugely and have got to suppress them if they want to force attendance; and remember that such fights are not just about one pencil because once a kid fails to defend his pencil, everything he owns including his body is up for grabs, just like in prison. Nations do the same and career diplomats have found no solution. School sports including gym class are part of the problem, as is supervision on buses.
I feel school buses should be integrated with city buses to provide adult supervision from passengers, despite the fact that some such adults will be drunk etc. Also, k-12 buses do better because 12th graders get little status from bullying kindergartners. It is peers and near peers who bully, k-12 far less so, and if college buses can be integrated, better still.
I think the discontinuation of online k-12 instruction at the end of the pandemic was a big mistake and a big opportunity for bullies, though at the expense of abusive parents and big siblings.
Working class adults, and teachers, delay paycheck gratification for a week, maybe two, while they expect school kids to delay it to an adulthood they can't even imagine? while being constantly assaulted by bullies who deliberately attack the studious?
Meanwhile, curricula is very weak on applications, starting almost entirely with theory and saving most applications for graduate school using excessive prerequisites without nearly enough McGuivering, though the texts and secret notes criticized above do require basic literacy just as my grade payment formula required me to be able to square a gradepoint.
BTW, I don't hate kids so much as to forget having been one. It turned out that my father offered to continue grade payments in college, but never told me, and if he had, I likely would have rested in summer and done better, but politics, including overpopulation politics, before the abortion rights movement embraced "reproductive justice" childcare funding demands, would still have interfered. I think I dropped out the very year the Cairo Convention "consensus" destroyed the global overpopulation movement, which is why Roe was never applied to occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.