Reply to Why academic awards for elementary aged kids are a bad idea.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am shocked by this thread.  How are you people going to teach your children to navigate the world?  Kids need to learn that it's important to work hard, that the kids who win awards are not necessarily smarter than them, but may be working harder, and that even if they try their best, they may still not win.  This is LIFE, and elementary age children are more than capable of handling it.[/quote]

so kids need to learn to try harder and they need to learn that no matter how hard they try they just aren't good enough?  Fine if that is in one thing that is about on thing in their lives, but school is their whole life right now.  So lets' say you have a job and aren't winning the awards there - promotions career advancement.  The lesson is to try harder right?  Ok. so you try your hardest and you still aren't able to advance (can't make partner or get tenure).  Well, you find a new job that better fits your talents and proclivities and you advance at that one.  Life lesson here is to move on.  But kids can't move on (till maybe they can choose the votech path in high school) and we don't want them to move on.  Wewant them, to learn.  So do these awards help students learn?  no.

School is not sports.  It is about learning.  [/quote]

Wow.  Kids who don't get awards aren't "not good enough" they just aren't the best at one particular thing.  It is not a big deal, and not analogous to promotion at work.  Moving on to the next grade is the promotion, and almost all of the kids get to do that.  People who are the best at their jobs will advance and get special awards, and sometimes it will not be directly correlated to their effort.  This is just life.  You cannot be the best at everything.  We should be a culture that celebrates achievement in school.[/quote]

But school isn't about achievement and when you make it about achievement you inhibit the learning of award winners and looser alike.  The thread was started by a mom whose son asked her if he just wasn't smart.  He is coming to think of himself in a certain way.  School isn't "one particular thing" you can't be best at, it is an endeavor you are engaged in for 6 hours of your day!  If you are not very good at your job, you will not keep it, which is fine, because you can find a job you are good at.  Kids cannot find a better job and there is no reason to rank who is very good and who is not - in fact there is every reason not to rank since ranking in elementary school is harmful to all.  We are a culture OBSESSED with academic achievement, unfortunately, for kids who could learn more but don't because they've labeled themselves a certain way (perhaps because they aren't good at school, perhaps because they aren't precocious and by the time their cognitive abilities caught up, they already labeled themselves) or don't because they won awards and have come to care more about the awards than learning (which often involves messy failures that won't win any awards) [/quote]

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