What is the purpose of high school?
Unfortunately for many students, the answer seems to be "to earn good grades so I can attend a good college".
For so many, high school is just a four-year period where the only goal is to get a perfect transcript and then move on to the next phase in their life.
Even worse, the chase for the “A” leads to terrible and unhealthy behaviors: Cramming material to midnight, cheating, and brown-nosing are all too familiar. Adversarial relationships with the teachers are an inherent part of this process as the teacher holds power over the student's prospects. Stress and anxiety are commonplace.
Some of the worst effects are felt by the most gifted of the students. Those who are creative, who are different, and aspire to do something great, are coerced into a system where they are expected to be like everyone else. Those students hate every moment of school, but they know they have to go through the motions, so they get on with their lives.
What a terrible experience for the gifted. What a terrible waste of time.
Ventures Academy believes that school should be a place of learning and mastery. Instead of chasing the "A" by any means necessary, every student should earn the perfect grade by simply mastering the material.
With the mastery system, we provide every student with unlimited time to demonstrate full comprehension of the material. There are no semester limits or final exams with this system. Instead, students continue the learning process until their mentors observe full mastery, and then - and only then - they earn their “A”.
Our students are never graded on a curve and, they never feel threatened by a punitive low score. They also cannot cheat their way to an A or cut corners.
The deal is simple: whenever they can demonstrate mastery, the perfect grade is guaranteed.
With mastery learning, we not only ensure that our students truly use their time in school to learn, but we remove the stress and anxiety from the process. This is essential since we need to allow their gifts to shine as they build their startups, and the stress of anxiety of the academics must not inhibit their creativity.
Comments