I'm sorry, but I'm in a mood to rant and I'd love for any of you to enlighten me on your opinions. And, it's long. I tend to go on forever. :/

One thing has been highlighted to me as of late... I suppose it being politics in schools; how unfair the awards system actually is. With my school year finally ended, there have been numerous award ceremonies and each and every one of them seems to support this, well, conspiracy that I've heard and almost believe.

The theory is that any award that cannot be supported by statistics will be given to a person who has connections; in this case, people with connections to teachers.

Let me explain. At the end of May, SSNL (School Sports Newfoundland and Labrador) had their recent awards ceremony. My boyfriend received the award for male high school athlete of the year, which is pretty intense considering how many athletes there are in any given province or, in most of your cases, states. I, of course, was very proud and it seemed obvious that Matt would also win our school's male athlete of the year. The only question on my part would be the female athlete (I was kinda hoping it would be me, but knew it couldn't be. I'll explain why later).

So our school's athletic award ceremony was held the Friday before last. Matt (involved with soccer, softball, basketball, volleyball, cross-country running and skiing, track and field, and badminton) won three MVPs for teams, as was expected at that time. However, another guy was a big winner, as well: a guy named Josh. Josh won 4 MVPs and the newly created track award for "pushing yourself to the next level" kinda thing. Josh was involved in fewer sports than Matt: ice hockey, ball hockey, softball, and track. Senior athlete is said to be based both on points (you get points for the number of teams you're on, how well those teams do, and your MVP count) and how much you "deserve" it.

I don't think I was the only one surprised that Matt, a national caliber badminton player and provincial level soccer player, ended up tying with Josh for my school's male athlete of the year. Another interesting note is that Josh also applied for SSNL athlete of the year but wasn't even considered in the top 3 of the applicants.

Here's another example of an odd happening at my school: the academic awards. The academic awards are composed of awards for each individual course, highest overall averages for each grade, and junior/senior student of the year. The first two are obviously calculated strictly by marks and the latter is a combination of marks, how you get along with the teachers/students, and your involvement in the school. Normally, due to massive 50% exams written in grade 12 courses, the overall average awards for grade 11 and 12 are postponed till the following year, when the exams are corrected and your final mark in the course is etched in stone. This year, the faculty somehow forgot about my grade's grade 11 results and just presented this year's awards for grade 11, even though their results aren't even finalized yet.

Anyways, that's a bit off the topic. For the past three years, the senior student winners have had some of the same characteristics. When I was in grade 9, the winner was involved in many sports, was ranked #2 in academics, and was involved in numerous clubs in the school. In grade 10, the winner was the valedictorian, who was also the yearbook editor, probably involved in the school newspaper, and tried out for the soccer team in her last year of high school. Last year, it was the guy ranked #2 or #3, who played hockey and was involved in student council stuff. So, overall, it's been some combination of athletics and academics, with school clubs and stuff.

This year was a complete contradiction to the norm. I could easily think of three candidates who would fit it easily: Matt (not only with sports, but he's ranked like #3, plays concert and jazz band, and was on student council last year), Jonathan (made a national concert band for oboe and won over $90 000 in scholarships; ranked #2), and, well, me... not to sound conceited (I'm involved in 4-5 sports every year, ranked #1, played in 3 school bands, and involved in 2 clubs or so). The actual winner was none of these; in fact, it was a girl named Stephanie. Steph was on the student council this year and has first class honors (average of 85%+). She organizes alot of events like variety shows and makes sure she either opens, closes, or performs in the middle of those shows; or, in the case of the most recent show, all of the above. She participates in alot of pageants, mostly because her and her mother organize them (never won one). There are also alot of people that don't exactly like her. So, we've got tallied up absolutely 0 sports, above average academics, little school involvement, and not exactly alot of student support in our grade. The only thing really going for her is the teachers.

Hmm... odd, isn't it, that teachers were the one who decided this award?

Here's another story, although I promise not as long. Junior male athlete of the year. There weren't many involved in alot of sports, and again it was tied. Boys named Jordan and Patric, involved in about 2 sports each, whereas at least three other boys were involved in at least that many sports, if not more.

Now, there's got to be a link between all these, right? If there wasn't, I wouldn't exactly be writing here. Josh, Steph, Jordan and Patric... say, aren't they all the children of faculty members? Josh is the son of one of the phys-ed teachers, Steph is the daughter of the secretary, Jordan is the son of the guidance counselor, and Patric is the son of the phys-ed teacher/vice principal.

This seems slightly corrupt to me. Another interesting note is that the first time there was ever a tie for athlete of the year in my school is when Melissa, a girl who won SSNL Female High School Athlete 5 or so years ago, tied with another girl... who was the daughter of the phys-ed teacher/vice principal; Patric's older sister.

I know I'm doing alot of name-dropping here, but I can't help it. It seems ridiculous to me. During my ranting about this to my family, my mother told me a story about a middle school girl. There were a bunch of awards there and her and another girl were considered for one of them. However, because she was considered for one award, she was automatically not considered for any other ones. Turns out she lost that award, only because the other candidate was on social assistance and the teacher thought it would be better for that girl; that the loser would go on and have a good life anyway.

Isn't that ridiculous? Basing awards not on merit, but on a bias opinion of "who deserves it"? Giving an award to someone else because "the other one will go on to do good things"? Perhaps this is just one big coincidence, but it seems like a pretty suspicious one to me.

Politics is enslaving every aspect from our life; kids are rewarded unfairly for having parents in high places and the world is wondering how kids became so spoiled. Kids are growing up demanding everything out of life and being unable to work for what they want. And why? These are the kids that are rewarded and put on pedestals early in life, the ones that are pushed into success by politics rather than talent. Imagine that middle school girl in years from now. If the system stays the same, she could lose every award, job offer, etc because someone else was "more deserving". Not more qualified; more deserving. Do you think this is going to encourage the girl to achieve great things in the future? I doubt it. It'll probably shoot her confidence down, thinking she really isn't deserving of that award. When confidence goes down, so can performance.

I understand trying to give unmotivated kids a push. I get that. Do you really think it's helping though? If these kids were in a marathon and one specific kid was always given a ride to the end in a bike, do you think that kid would actually be able to finish on top when there's no bike around?

That's it for me. Sorry for all of this.

...Thank you.

Politics in our schools suck, but it happens. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't ACCUSE the school district and teachers of being corrupt, they'd destroy you. (Trust me I've thought about it sometimes)

If you don't have the connections or the early biases with teachers, you can't succeed at the highest level. There are a certain few last names at my school which automatically give you a solo in choir concerts or a lead in the plays/musicals. Yes, the music sector of my school is corrupt. Very, and I know it. Luckily I have no aspirations for being front center next year, I just wanna be on the stage, because I don't have one of the four last names that seem sacred.

There's ntohing we can do, it's wrong and it's not fair for anyone, but it happens. We have to sit back and just deal with it, I guess.

Hmmm, I never noticed any of this at my High School. For most of the awards at my school, there were set prerequisites for any award (except a few awards that really weren't important). Students with certain GPAs got awards. Students who were on the math/other teams and placed in competitions got awards. On the classroom level, there were highest grade, attendence, etc. It seems like all the awards at my school were based off of a certain achievement, IE highest placement or grade, or were given to any amount of students who possessed a certain prerequisite.

The only awards that I can think of that were biased were student choice, and all of those "most likely to succeed" type things.

Maybe my school was just less corrupt. Maybe I just didn't notice any corruption because I never really cared about awards. However, it does seem stupid the way awards work at your school. It seems like the people who deserve recognition are not getting it, and those who deserve less are actually getting more.

The most corrupt thing in my old high school was the chess club :XD Well, half of it descended from the director, so I guess it's no biggie. They only ever got a head start, but even daddy couldn't do anything when you beat them fair and square :P

My school tends to suffer from some of the same problems, but I got a little bit of a different view on it because of how big our school is. When our teachers pick favorites, the only thing it can really affect is how the student is treated in class. There are enough kids and teachers in the school that if a kid happens to be the son of another teacher and try to play that card, the teacher they're trying to manipulate hasn't even heard of their parents.

At times, when it comes to things like band, choir, and sports, it can seem like teachers are giving the solos to other teachers' kids (there're a bunch, I swear they make up a quarter of our school), but in the end, those kids deserve it. One of my friends, this kid named David, gets all the marching band solos, all the solos in band, and was put in the jazz combo "just because he could do it." There were a few parents that spoke up against this because he's the band director's son, when the truth is that this kid is the best musician and athlete the school has seen in twenty years. David just happened to get all the talents his parents had when they were in high school, and because they're teachers, they make him perfect everything he does.

All the teachers in my school district that have kids in high school almost seem to have pushed whatever subject they teach onto their kids, so now their kids are awesome at that. Each one of the choir teachers (that are old enough) have kids that are some of the best singers I've ever heard. I don't complain when other people get all the awards in my school, because 99% of the time they deserve it. The only time when people really complain is student council... even if it is fun to look at... :rolleyes:

Back to how the kids are treated in class... Just for fun...

Yeah, our teachers play favorites, and can let some kids get by with more things than others. A year or two ago, this kid named will accidently bit the german teacher and she just laughed it off. The next week me and some kids were playing the penis/llama game. I yelled scrotum and got sent to the principal's office... Not cool...

I dunno, as far as sports it's tough to read. I know that the girl athlete who won at my school definitely deserved it, she's an amazing basketball player who got a free ride to someplace awesome (don't remember where) and was on some other sports too. It's also a little harder to say that one student in particular deserves the award, because we only let students play on one school team per season. That being said, at our school all the coaches were teachers at schools in different districts, so though they certainly had favorites, it was mostly that they favored whoever was best at the sport.

Of course, there still is unfairness and whatnot. There's this complete pothead who's an amazing swimmer, but the coach hates him because he's a jerk. So even though he made all the quantitative requirements for varsity, he didn't get on because he's a jerk. Which I found kinda unfair - I made varsity too, but I wasn't anywhere near this kid (he probably could have been recruited by one of the private schools if he wanted). But as far as MVP, best new swimmer, etc, those mostly went to the people who deserved them. (well, I didn't get MVP grrrrr but I didn't need it for my resume anyways, and didn't deserve it either :P).

As far as academics, Karn's post kinda sums up my school. There were some douchebag teachers, but for the most part they didn't necessarily pull a lot of weight in things. For the most part, teachers didn't have their own kids in their classes because our district is really expensive, and the teachers can't afford to live here (even though they get paid more than most). My 9th grade bio teacher did have her daughter in class, but...she is not a softy, I wasn't in there at the time but I would think the teacher was harder on her daughter than on the others.

I guess it's different in my school. It serves about 10 000 people or so in at least 5 communities. There's about 40 or 50 faculty members and 600-700 students; since there's only 1-3 teachers per subject, chances are that teachers will teach their children. There's no limit on how many sports you can play, either, as long as it doesn't affect your academics.

Still, there's a huge chance I'm just overreacting about all of this. I tend to do that. :/

Well, lemme just say that even though I don't think there was much "corruption" or w/e in my school (at least in terms of student awards) the situation you described, and your conclusions, seemed pretty plausible. I don't necessarily think my opinion is particularly authoritative, but it seems like you've looked at everything pretty carefully.

I dunno. The nice thing about this is that you can, at least, realize that the award is just the recognition of the awesome stuff you've done either way. Even if some stupid acting-vice-assistant-sub principal pats his kid on the head instead of giving you ribbon, you know very well all the ass you've been kicking. Just feel bad for the kids for whom "parental affection" amounts to pulling strings.

My attitude here is that they both should've been given the award. I mean, I assume the girl on social assistance was also well qualified. If it's so close you have to call it on something like that...don't call it! If 2 or more candidates have shown themselves to be exemplary, why does the school have to rule "in favor" of one over the other? I understand it on competitive teams, for instance, at my HS we probably had no more than 60 kids on the swim team. So it's easy to break down who's the overall best for a particular season. But, IMO, not so with a larger class with much more wide ranging awards (where clubs, sports, grades, etc are taken into account).

The odd thing about this is that most of these examples here were brought to my attention by other people; I just found a connecting link between them. And I'm not the only one in my school who's seen these links. After the academic awards, one of my soccer teammates texted Matt and expressed her discontent at Steph winning over me. Now, it's perfectly understandable why I didn't get it as I was suspended the day before (I participated in the school's traditional water fight. Just my luck this would be the first year for a punishment :rolleyes: ). Matt's also been upset, but that can be attributed mostly to the Josh deal, possibly jealousy, and just his character.

It's hard not to feel bad for them sometimes, though, because you realize that once they're off on their own, they don't have that edge anymore. They'll have to work for things that they're just not used to working for.

Oh, I agree totally in that regard; individual sports are easily accounted for. But even team sports, it's hard to judge that clearly. Take soccer, for example, as I'm sure most countries around have those teams. You can give the award to the guy who scores the most goals because obviously he helped lead your team to victory, but what about the other positions? The goalie also helped you win by not letting goals in and, even then, defensemen make sure that a minimum number of shots are taken on the goalie to begin with. So, really, you can't judge player value on goals scored or whatever because that's just what some positions are supposed to do. If you don't judge by goals, then, do you go with sportsmanship? Then, you might end up picking the player with skills that only burden the team.

It's all so crazy how players can't be picked that actual embody the award. In boys' basketball, the award was given to the highest-scoring player. You know how he got all those baskets? Not passing the ball, not respecting his teammates, and being unsportsmanlike. Yet, there was another player, though less aggressive, who scored alot and kept a cool head at all times. Similarly, last year, MVP for the girls' basketball was given to a girl named Cassandra. Sure, she was a good player and scored alot, but, like the previous example, she didn't pass the ball often and caused alot of turnovers because of it. Here's the crazy thing though: the dept of education created a "no smoking" policy the past few years, and that means that anyone caught smoking, drinking, or doing drugs on a sports event will have their team disqualified. During the middle of the provincial championships, Cassandra went out back and got caught smoking by our coach. If it had been anyone else who caught her, we'd be disqualified. However, apparently this is worthy of MVP?

It's all so relative. It all depends on the coach and the year, really. In "Senior Student" awards, at least you have some sort of even playing field in theory. You can compare grades and extra-curricular activities evenly. The other one are extremely biased, but still. Sports are so different, and I can only imagine drama to be the same. One actor can get certain emotions through better than others, and it's just so... biased. I still can't get over it.

You'd be surprised. For the first time in our school, AP classes were required to be a valedictorian or salutatorian. I took two AP classes, and ended up with a 3.87 or so. If they were not required, I would not have even been salutatorian, as a girl who took no AP classes maintained a 4.0. Obviously, are grades could not be compared on the same level, so she was not in the running.

Oy vey...as far as the water fight thing goes, do you guys still have a jungle gym? At my elementary school they took out the jungle gym, and the monkey bars, and other fun stuff because it was too dangerous or something. And we weren't supposed to have snowball fights in high school. The fun, sometimes I am missing it.

I know that for my old high school, we had some kinda system where there was a high school GPA for AP courses, etc that was on a 5 point scale instead of a 4 point scale. If you got an A in a honors course, you got a 4.5, and if you got an A in an AP or high honors course (high honors is pretty uncommon, it's basically considered to be as difficult but there's no corresponding AP course) that was a 5. Something like that.

For our school, I think it was "undecided" between 3 students who should be valedictorian (all had same scores), so the faculty just said "fine, we're not deciding, all 3 are best GPAwise." I think they just didn't call it, there wasn't a valedictorian speech.

lol, we had our class president instead, because our class elections matter so much. Well, our class pres was a very nice, likable girl, but I remember that when they made the elections online they had to redo the election on paper because less than 50 people (of ~2000 kids) voted.

Hehe. Well, I dunno if anyone else saw No Country for Old Men but I think the guy who played Anton Chigurh won that VERY handily. Well, that's as far as superstar hollywood awards go, I realize that's not very comparable to anything any of us go through, and that the education system doesn't offer enough chances for us to play professional killers in movies with Tommy Lee Jones in them. I know there's something called SVPA for drama nerds but I'm not really clear on whether there are individual awards (I think our school won it for the best play one year while I was there, figures that I don't know even though I had 3 or 4 good friends innit).

We used to that, but then people became penalized for interest in arts-I had 5 full art credits thru four years, and with that kind of system, my gpa would have been lower for it.

As for number of val/salu, our school kind of cheats...they only look out to the 10th of a gpa point, so 3.9s were val, and 3.8s were sal.

For the valedictorian thing, well, there's no AP courses here. I think you have to be in advanced math, but all they do is take the highest average from math, English, a science, a social science, and a level III 2 credit elective.

Exactly the same here. Not allowed to throw snowballs, period. We didn't have a jungle gym in elementary school but they had a system for the swings and slide so that only one class had it per lunchtime. Just so happens that those classes were like every class besides grades 6-8 and my school was K-8. Oh welllll...

Hmm, I definitely understand your anger, or at least your dissatisfaction... My school's talent show was similarly horrible, though I may have a bias due to the fact that I was IN the talent show, but still, I digress. Year I was in it, my band opened, got a HUGE crowd reaction, didn't fuck up the rest of the world, and pow, we got NOTHING. The winners? A really, REALLY, bad hip-hop dance group... like, one of them was OUT OF SYNC WITH THE OTHER THREE! They sucked, quite honestly, and how the fuck did they get this shit?

Frustrating, and there were so many more talented acts... It's really stupid. They won again the next year. Now what burns me about this is, the best singer in the school was singing lead, while the most badass guitarist and easily the best drummer in the school were also in the band, no clue about the bassist... and yet, the same damn group won for the third year in a row. Is the school trying to be politically correct or someshit? Cause it's not fan reaction. That guitarist and drummer were definitely what's known as "teen heartthrobs" and they're popular as hell, what the fuck is up with that?

Reyde,
as far as talent shows and the like go, it could just as much be incompetence on the part of the judges as corruption, political correctness, or whateverelseness.

Instead of trying to argue this point I'll simply resort to a wikipedia link.
Cock-up before conspiracy

By the by, some attribute it to the author Robert Heinlein, who I don't even think is very good even though countless people I respect think he's awesome.