NO PROFIT NO GRADE
Oftentimes, we rush through family meals and forget what a wonderful opportunity this is to learn about the people who live in our homes and about ourselves. The mornings and evenings my son and I spend together at the table eating breakfasts and dinners have produced interesting conversations.
This morning’s conversation was quite revealing as to what goes on at school. The kind of things he learns and other things he would be better off learning elsewhere. As we ate the crescent rolls that my son baked, some with Nutella and others with lemon curd, he let me know that he and most everyone in class got a zero on a project due to their not selling the products they developed in Entrepreneurship class.
This was not the first time I contacted this particular teacher. In fact, when I looked at my saved files, I noticed that the last time I wrote her an email was exactly a month ago on this very day. The 19th. Nothing much seemed to have changed as a result of my previous email. Therefore, I decided to write her another one.
Dear Kyleigh,
This morning over breakfast, Sage was explaining what he has learned from your class this year.
He informed me that almost everyone in class got a zero on the most recent project as nobody sold anything. That nobody made a profit. Except for the handful of people who got their parents to buy their products just so they could get a passing grade. This is both disappointing and dishonest. In addition, it teaches children a bad lesson.
The lesson that Sage got from that is 'If you don't sell anything, you're a failure'. This does not align with reality. He also said, 'Just because you don't sell something, you're not going to quit'. And he is absolutely right about this.
Had I known this class was not going to actually teach entrepreneurship as it pertains to real life, I would never have suggested my son to take this class. Instead, I would have had him create products for my Etsy shop or have his father teach him about what it takes to start a business.
I hope that future classes take into account the true meaning of what it takes to run a business. I also hope that you would at least give students credit for the efforts they made on this recent project so that they can go into the world with motivation and determination to be the next entrepreneurs of their generation.
As with other emails I have written to the school over the past year, there was no response.
The lesson these students have learned seems to be ‘no profit no grade’. Since they were unsuccessful in selling the products that nobody would buy anyway, according to my son, they would fail the assignment.
This is hardly the way it works in the real world. If one would quit their startups at the first sign of hardship, there would be few businesses. Nobody would bother trying anymore. Lessons would not be learned.
Since almost everyone got a zero, save for the one or two individuals who convinced their parents to save them, wouldn’t that have more to do with the teacher’s ability to teach rather than the student’s ‘failure’ to fulfill the project?
