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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
Pleasure
Completing
Successfully
Grades
Student
Task
Tasks
Experiences
Students
Dilute

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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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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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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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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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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.
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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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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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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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There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.
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When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.
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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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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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Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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