Is that one of the other reasons there's such a knee jerk negative reaction to competition in schools......the ignorant notion that there has to be a loser??
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There is ALWAYS a loser when you have a competition. Usually one winner and many losers.
There do not need to be ANY losers at all. In other countries they manage quite well to focus on educating ALL the children without focusing on winners and losers.
Take traditional HS athletics: you have several teams, baseball, football, basketball, track. Maybe together they have 10% of the student body, but the get 90% of the attention, equipment, expenditures. The fat kids, the scrawny kids, the kids with poor coordination... they get no attention at all, and THEY are the ones who need the exercise.
HS teachers do not control the curriculum, school boards do, by the way. And most of the teachers are not bad teachers. Whet sucks is the way the curriculum is devised. In Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries, HS graduates leave schoo;l very fluent in English: in the US, very few manage to become fluent. The fault is NOT the teachers, it is the curriculum: the idea that foreign language fluency can be achieved in a regular classroom for 45 minutes a day for two or three years is a faulty one. In Sweden and the Netherlands, subject material classes in sciences, math and such are taught in English. Nearly the entire country is bilingual.
We do not have teachers that can teach anything but foreign languages in anything other than English.
Stupid sirs would have us ban all unions from schools and fire any teachers who are not asshole Republicant's. Like that would work.
