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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Student
Task
Tasks
Experiences
Students
Dilute
Pleasure
Completing
Successfully
Grades

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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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To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
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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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We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.
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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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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
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If rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone - employers and employees - from the issues that really matter.
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The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.
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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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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 can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?
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Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.
Alfie Kohn
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Alfie Kohn
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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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Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Alfie Kohn
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
Alfie Kohn
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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches it’s what the learner learns.
Alfie Kohn