View all these vids here.
The Quiet Man draws attention to an issue I hadn't given much thought to - that of extrinsic rewards in class for work well done. He took the line that:
Time was when pupils seeking special treatment from their teachers would bring an apple into class. Now teachers wishing to lavish praise on their pupils are rewarding them with chocolates and sweets.
With all due respect, I count chocolate in its dark form as a good food source, as distinct from sweets but no matter. Further on, the real issue emerges in one quote:
I know there are many more effective ways to get the best out of children, bribery never works long term, makes those who may miss out feel bad and sends the wrong message. Children need to learn to make good achievements for themselves.
Well, yes. So what about these two situations?
Mea culpa 1
Long, long ago, I took a team of young cricketers to a match against a much vaunted side. In a nutshell, we were getting a drubbing and the little tykes were not overly happy about the experience. One of the parents approached his own son and his best mate whom the parent had driven to the match and offered a trip to Alton Towers if they could go out there and score 20 runs apiece [it was a 15-15 match].
My guilt was that I laughed when I heard that and took the point of view that what he did in a private capacity with his two kids was not affecting the rest of the team.
The two kids did team up at the fall of wickets and simply Bothamed the opposition round the ground. This inspired the rest of our boys and we won the match convincingly. However, another parent had been standing close by and on Monday I was hauled up before the boss.
The boss had just sung the praises of the team as a whole at assembly and was in a difficult position. He told me what the disgruntled parent had said and said it was best to stop this tactic being used in future, which I subsequently guarded against.
As I went out of the door he smiled and said well done.
Mea culpa 2
Cut to our local area rugby tournament where the U11 boys and I trained and trained for three weeks prior to it, developing a way of running off the shoulder then suddenly reverting to the Australian style of throwing the ball wide. With this age we needed some strategies for the breakdowns as well.
It was a lot of hard work.
As we then played practice matches against the U12s and U13s before being knocked off by the U14s, the attention of the rugby staff turned to our little tykes and the forwards coach came in and offered tips and the backs coach trained our backs.
On the day we had an army of parents with hot toddies, blankets and so on and the kids were rotated to stay warm. The tournament result from 4 twenty minute games was 128-8.
There was a local area sports teachers meeting which deplored the tactics of our school in general and me in particular for developing such a ball-aggressive manner of playing [I'd drummed it into the boys that the ball was the entire focus, that tackling was best done in pairs and done hard to prevent injury and that in such short matches constant motion was the best tactic to worry the other team and to keep our bodies warm] and the slick approach to winning.
Well, all right - OTT but they could have done that too, the opposition, had they wished.
Sport is sport and class is class. In sports like rugby and cricket, whatever is the point of going out there to get a drubbing? It seems to me that one uses all the resources at one's disposal to the maximum, one looks after one's players and if defeated, at least the opposition will know they've been in a game.
The classroom is different and here compassion has to kick in for all children. I firmly believe in two principles here:
1. Excellence should never be mediocritized and the able should never be dragged back to a standard just so the less able may feel better. If my child is capable, then I'd expect the school to maximize his opportunities to pursue excellence. As a teacher, it is his job to extend that child any which way, with no reference to class norms but only to the pleasure the child gets from achieving as the goal, no extrinsic rewards.
2. That same teacher, if he fails to explore the less able child's whole being in order to seek out something, anything which he can then boost in order to give that child a taste of success - that teacher is being negligent. The teacher really must do everything possible to assist the less able to find some sort of success in some area and to allow his peers to praise him for it. He must construct situations in which this can occur. He must be the rock on whom that child can depend.
3. A teacher without compassion should not be in the classroom. At the same time, providing false successes and encouraging an attitude of "we don't have to do anything as we're going to be rewarded anyway" is skewing the whole meaning of point 2 above. Rewording failure is not the same thing as providing opportunities for genuine success which the child knows in his heart can't be taken away from him. Kids know if it was real or if it was a sop.
Where do sweets come into this? I feel they shouldn't - nor cabbages or other foodstuffs. It's a false signal.
In sport though - well, I'm not so sure, as it is a competitive environment and while the lengths many coaches and parents go to to win are just plain wrong and should be condemned, still - you're there, aren't you, to equip your kids with the means to play at a level which will enable you to win. It's a total package of successful strategy and man-management.
It's a fine line.
