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If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Would
Faculty
Lower
Relax
Serve
Standards
Orientation
Toward
Emphasis
Learning
Grades
Might
Encourage

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Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.
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Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naïve and is dismissed.
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How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.
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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.
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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up they should have the chance to live in one today.
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Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
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We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.
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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
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Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
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What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade
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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
Alfie Kohn
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In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.
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You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.
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