I want to begin this post with three anecdotes.
The first happened to me today. This semester for one of the subjects I’m tutoring, each class is divided into four teams for group work. At the first tutorial, I went around the room and gave every person a number between 1 and 4. In one of my classes, after two weeks, one team realised they had one too many people. That means that one of them would have forgotten their numbers and mistakenly joined their group, leaving another group one short. Now you wonder if this happened to you, the questions that you’d think you’d ask might be, “We’ve realised we have one too many and another team may now be disadvantaged. Should one of us join their team to make sure group work is balanced and fair in our class?”
Rather, the question that found its way to my inbox today was, “So you’ve put an extra person in our group. Are you going to mark us more harshly because we have more people?”
A friend of mine lecturing this semester explained to her students in the first week that they will have 5 essay questions in their final exam, from which they choose 3 to answer. One of her students raised her hand and asked if they will be given the questions before the exam. My friend replied, “Yes, of course I will” sarcastically, but to her shock, the joke was lost on her Masters students who genuinely believed that they would be spoon-fed in their advanced postgraduate degrees.
Lastly, in the previous semester, I tutored in a subject where two students had to give a presentation every week. When I sent a pair of students their great mark and feedback, one of them responded with a long dispute of my feedback and blamed the students in their class for being “stony-faced” and “unresponsive” as the reason why their presentation may have seemed any less than perfect. She furiously argued that she deserved the highest mark for their presentation.
On the surface level, these three anecdotes depict some common annoyances with a job I otherwise adore, but I think they also reveal something very sad about the way the values these students hold. I love students who have a thirst for knowledge and love to learn, but to hold academic achievement in the shallow form of grades above consideration and respect for others to me is appalling. I think a very simple way to avoid bringing up adults (my students are generally between 19 and 24 years old) who put how they are assessed above fairness, expect their teachers to do everything short of taking their assessments for them, or blame everyone else rather than accept their own shortcomings, is to maintain conversations with your children throughout high school and university and even Masters degrees and PhDs about what they are learning rather than the grade they received at the end of the year.
When children are rewarded only for the marks they receive, they learn that in order to gain your attention and encouragement, they need to get high grades at whatever costs, regardless if they really learnt anything. Unfortunately, this means that in university when group work and class discussions become assessable, these students perform badly because they don’t know how to suspend judgement, remain open-minded and exercise critical thinking skills. They just want to arrive at the ‘right’ answer as quickly as possible. In worst case scenarios, I’ve seen this erupt into aggression or descend into depression. But just having conversations with children regularly at home about what they are enjoying the most or finding the most interesting about their lessons, and rewarding them for applying effort, especially to challenging subjects that they are not naturally good at, I believe, will lead to happier adults who function better in university.
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Hirwazh Anchor
1 month ago
3 comments:
This is an interesting post, I guess I never really thought about those kinds of links between teaching and my own future parenting. You're right about intrinsic and extrinsic rewarding, something that develops all throughout their childhood - how do you get kids to do something without giving them a treat, like lollies or even a trampoline when they get into Selective School? (That's what I got...and I'm not complaining ;) Interestingly, by the time they're in Year 7 they've already developed an expectation of extrinsic rewards, whether it be a good mark or a positive report on their behaviour for their teacher. Furthermore, the rewards - and the output of their learning - often need to be physical to have any impact... Students need to produce notes, a completed table, a report. Just leaving them to discuss and gain an understanding isn't enough. Something must be tangible to exhibit their greater knowledge, otherwise they can't see the point of the exercise, and they have no motivation to do it.
Perhaps this is how those schools you've been researching do a better job than the ordinary system.
You have some interesting views on parenting, and what sort of values you would like your child to develop. These are ultimately values that you...well, value, so what I'm interested in is, how did your parents instill these values in you? How did they encourage and scaffold through their parenting styles and their manipulation of the environment? I think it would be allow an interesting, well-rounded reflection in your blog if also referred to these in your entries :)
Ah, Psychology seems a lifetime away.. I did a little research, and it is proven that at younger years it is harder for students to disentangle their global self-esteem (overall feelings of self-worth in general) from academic studies, while it becomes less and less important as they get to the senior years. But then it makes you wonder - could this reverse once in university, especially in Masters and Post-grad courses, where they have significantly invested their time, their money, their effort, and their identity, into their studies. No longer is their academic prowess domain-specific (ie. The domain of academics, which they excel in, boosts their self-esteem and self-concept but only in that field), but transfers over to affect their overall global self-esteem, becoming who they are and competing against other such domains of worth, such as being a good friend, or a considerate person?
As you think about it, here's another finding that migh be interesting to think of in terms of that other question I asked, about how you, or others, were raised as a child.
"Watkins and Dhawan (1989) pointed out that people from different cultures tend to think about themselves in specific ways. For example, people from Western cultures tend to have an individualistic self-concept, with the emphasis on individual characteristics and achievement. However, those from non-Western cultures tend to report a collectivistic self-concept, in which the person does not think about him/herself so much as an individual, but rather in terms of relationships with other people (e.g., as a daughter or husband; Chan, 1997)."
Thanks for your really detailed and considered responses, N!
I guess I could definitely reflect on how my parents instilled those values in me, but not all my values are necessarily shared with them. I think if they both had more time and a better grasp of the language, they would have intervened a lot more negatively in my education that likely resulted in an obsession with the final quantitative output of my learning (grades), but they couldn't, and didn't. I also went to a primary school where we had people in Year 6 who had just arrived in the country and could barely communicate in English and it would have been impossible to set homework or assignments without an even playing field. I don't even remember getting report cards.
But I think the most influential thing that shaped my values about focussing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards was meeting people who were only concerned about marks. One of my friends in primary school went from being the most popular girl in school for her wit and kindness became gradually ostracised because she spent a year in another school and returned with a hunger more high marks over everything else. She became underhanded and manipulative and would purposely lead others to the wrong answers so she would look even smarter by comparison. I think these instances are much more effective in shaping an appreciation for intrinsic motivation than abstract mantras of "marks don't matter" from your parents.
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