Shane Rabacs ’19, Staff Writer
In August, Principal James D’Amico, who was voted as principal in March of this year by the Westport School Board, asked teachers at Staples High School to consider not giving extra credit anymore.
“My feeling is that when we offer students something simply for points, we are just feeding the urge to try to argue about grades.” D’Amico said.
D’Amico was previously Westport’s director of secondary education and a social studies teacher at Staples for 8 years, before becoming principal.
While extra credit wasn’t commonly used by teachers, it was still an option for students to raise their grades if they did poorly on previous assignments.
“I think that it is really annoying because you no longer have the chance to show the teacher how passionate you are for the class and how willing you are to do extra work for a grade” Ryan Smith, ’19, said.
In contrast to Smith’s opinion, Sean Hackett, ’18, says “I think it’s fair. Get the grade you want the first time”.
In it’s place, D’amico suggested finding a better way to allow students to receive points: “I suggested that it would be a better approach to allow students to redo something that we actually want them to learn, not just give them an extra assignment. I think this is important if we want to continue to create a school where we focus on learning from mistakes, and improving, not just getting graded.”
