School Problems: Bribes

After working as a classroom teacher for a year as well as holding various positions in schools before this year, I feel I have an insight into some of the problems that are making our schools ineffective.  There are so many that I am going to dedicate a different blog post to each one. I want to emphasize that most of my criticisms are aimed at the system or our culture and not at the individuals that are working in the school.  There is only so much you can do as a classroom teacher when you are being instructed about what to do every minute of every day. Off to complaint number 1!

Bribes. Why do we have to bribe kids to do things? What kind of values are we instilling in our young when we tell them that we will give them something for doing what they should be doing already?  My students were really into Takis. For the unenlightened, Takis are a type of Mexican Dorito. They would do nearly anything if you promised them a bag. But when there was no fatty, salty prize involved, there was no enthusiasm at all for any assignment, no matter how important the test was. They didn't care at all about doing a good job, only about doing a good enough job to get a bag of chips. It was a normal occurrence for me to tell the students that the test was important and going to be seen by parents and be put in their cumulative folder only for them to reply with something like, "What do we get if we do well?""A good grade," I would reply, but that comment was always met with disdain. What about a feeling of accomplishment? What about knowing that you did your best on something? I ended up relenting by the end of the year, mainly because I was the only teacher in my grade not giving out chips or cupcakes as an incentive to perform on tests.  I didn't think it was fair that my students were the only ones not getting prizes for mediocre test results.

Why do we have to give prizes? I want my kid to grow up and be a good person. He will get rewards for doing the right thing, but hopefully they will be intrinsic.  Doing something well should be the reward in and of itself. Other rewards also follow jobs well done, but they shouldn't be expected, just appreciated. My school experience this year has shown me that our youth uses physical prizes as a gage to what is important: no prize equals no importance. How do we break the cycle? I think we need to stop giving kids food as prizes.  (School food will definitely be another blog post coming up.) We need to show the students we value their character much more than their test scores. We should value our students as humans instead of as numbers or colors on a test report. We need to do this on a school wide basis and not as individual teachers. When only one teacher tries it, they just come across to the students as not caring, but if all the teachers and administrators refused to bribe the students and instead, rewarded them with praise based upon how hard they worked to attain the score they earned the students would begin valuing their own performance over the prizes.