If I were a middle school teacher, I would implement this system to make nerdy kids more popular (and maybe make aspiring popular kids work harder in class): every week, I would select a handful of students who I felt had done good work that week (according to my subjective taste), and they could write down the names of 3 or 4 other students in the class (but not themselves) who would earn a modest amount of extra credit. Ideally, I would name the students at the start of the week, and only take their nominations at the end of the week, so they have plenty of time for other students to attempt to curry favour with them. (Although perhaps having the students be unknown until they make their nominations would encourage students to anticipate who I would select each week, which may make for more salient long-term effects)
This way, I can hijack the vicious social mechanisms that are prevalent in middle school, and use them to promote an intellectual culture
I read somewhere that intelligent people are a positive externality for their neighbors. Their activity improves the country on average, and they only capture a part of the value they add.
If you could clone thousand Einsteins (talented not all in physics, but each one in something different), they could improve your country so much that your life would be awesome, despite the fact that you couldn’t compete with them for the thousand best jobs in the country. From the opposite perspective, if you appeared in Idiocracy, perhaps you could become a king, but you would have no internet, no medicine, probably not even good food, or plumbing. From the moment you would actually need something to work, life would suck.
But this effect is artifically removed in schools. Smart classmates are competitors (and grading on the curve takes it to the extreme), and cooperation is frowned upon. The school system is an environment that incentivizes hostility against smart people.
You suggest an artificial mechanism that would incentivize being friendly with the nerds. I like it! But maybe a similar effect could be achieved by simply removing the barriers to cooperation. Abolish all traces of grading on curve; make grades dependent on impartial exams by a computer, so that one year everyone may succeed and another year everyone may fail. (Also, make something near-mode depend on the grades. Like, every time you pass an exam, you get a chocolate. Twenty exams allow you to use a gym one afternoon each week. Etc.) And perhaps, students will start asking their smater classmates to tutor them; which will in turn increase the status of the tutors. Maybe. Worth trying, in my opinion.
I saw an anecdote from a parent with two children somewhere, saying that when going outside, they used to reward the child who would get dressed first. This caused competition and bad feelings between the kids. Then they switched to rewarding both based on how quickly they got to the point where both were dressed. Since the children now had a common goal, they started helping each other.
I wonder if one could do apply something like that to a classroom, to make the smart kids be perceived as an asset by the rest of the class.
And perhaps, students will start asking their smater classmates to tutor them; which will in turn increase the status of the tutors. Maybe.
Datapoint: Finnish schools mostly don’t grade on a curve, and some kids did ask me for help in high school, help that I was happy to provide. For the most part it felt like nobody really cared about whether you were smart or not, it was just another personal attribute like the color of your hair.
A cute senior in my high school Physics class asked me to tutor her after school because she was having a hard time. I can’t overstate the ways in which this improved me as a young-geek-person, and I think she got better at doing physics, too. Your proposal would tend to create more opportunities like that, I think, for cross-learning among students who are primarily book-intelligent and those who may be more social-intelligent.
If I were a middle school teacher, I would implement this system to make nerdy kids more popular (and maybe make aspiring popular kids work harder in class): every week, I would select a handful of students who I felt had done good work that week (according to my subjective taste), and they could write down the names of 3 or 4 other students in the class (but not themselves) who would earn a modest amount of extra credit. Ideally, I would name the students at the start of the week, and only take their nominations at the end of the week, so they have plenty of time for other students to attempt to curry favour with them. (Although perhaps having the students be unknown until they make their nominations would encourage students to anticipate who I would select each week, which may make for more salient long-term effects)
This way, I can hijack the vicious social mechanisms that are prevalent in middle school, and use them to promote an intellectual culture
I read somewhere that intelligent people are a positive externality for their neighbors. Their activity improves the country on average, and they only capture a part of the value they add.
If you could clone thousand Einsteins (talented not all in physics, but each one in something different), they could improve your country so much that your life would be awesome, despite the fact that you couldn’t compete with them for the thousand best jobs in the country. From the opposite perspective, if you appeared in Idiocracy, perhaps you could become a king, but you would have no internet, no medicine, probably not even good food, or plumbing. From the moment you would actually need something to work, life would suck.
But this effect is artifically removed in schools. Smart classmates are competitors (and grading on the curve takes it to the extreme), and cooperation is frowned upon. The school system is an environment that incentivizes hostility against smart people.
You suggest an artificial mechanism that would incentivize being friendly with the nerds. I like it! But maybe a similar effect could be achieved by simply removing the barriers to cooperation. Abolish all traces of grading on curve; make grades dependent on impartial exams by a computer, so that one year everyone may succeed and another year everyone may fail. (Also, make something near-mode depend on the grades. Like, every time you pass an exam, you get a chocolate. Twenty exams allow you to use a gym one afternoon each week. Etc.) And perhaps, students will start asking their smater classmates to tutor them; which will in turn increase the status of the tutors. Maybe. Worth trying, in my opinion.
I saw an anecdote from a parent with two children somewhere, saying that when going outside, they used to reward the child who would get dressed first. This caused competition and bad feelings between the kids. Then they switched to rewarding both based on how quickly they got to the point where both were dressed. Since the children now had a common goal, they started helping each other.
I wonder if one could do apply something like that to a classroom, to make the smart kids be perceived as an asset by the rest of the class.
Datapoint: Finnish schools mostly don’t grade on a curve, and some kids did ask me for help in high school, help that I was happy to provide. For the most part it felt like nobody really cared about whether you were smart or not, it was just another personal attribute like the color of your hair.
A cute senior in my high school Physics class asked me to tutor her after school because she was having a hard time. I can’t overstate the ways in which this improved me as a young-geek-person, and I think she got better at doing physics, too. Your proposal would tend to create more opportunities like that, I think, for cross-learning among students who are primarily book-intelligent and those who may be more social-intelligent.