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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
Successfully
Grades
Student
Task
Tasks
Experiences
Dilute
Students
Pleasure
Completing

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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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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.
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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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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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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We can't value only what is easy to measure measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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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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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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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
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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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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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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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