What's it Worth to You?

My eleven year old daughter had just listed off her current grades on her iPhone.  She knew how to find the info from the school's web site.  She also knows that I have access to the same information and that I rarely check it (and discuss it even less).

"Math, B"

"RLA, B"

Social Studies, A"

"Science..."

"Choir, A" 

"Cooking, A"

Hey, what about Science?  

"Oh, didn't I already say that?"

No

"Oh, it's a C but It'll go up this week..."

There is truth and there are lies and there are omissions & statistics somewhere in the middle.

After a minute she asked this:

"What will I get if I get all A's and B's on my report card?"

I gave her the look of someone who's just been asked how to say pomegranate in Swahili.

Have we ever rewarded you (or punished you for that matter) for a grade report?  Sure, we'll go out to dinner to hang out and celebrate the end of another year.  And, we will acknowledge teacher comments as well as the letter grade.  But rewards?

We're relatively aware of our high schoolers' GPAs.  No, we don't reward or punish for grades.  After all, our girls know how "school" works.  It's a bit of a game, after all and there are rules for playing the game.  More importantly, they know the consequences of their actions and make decisions accordingly.  The decisions haven't always been positive, of course.  But, they always know that they have to "own" them; not us.

Our eldest refused to give an oral report in her 6th grade RLA class.  The teacher explained to her and to us that she would drop a letter grade if she didn't give the report.  We encouraged her to get over herself, but didn't, otherwise, intervene.  She refused and received the B instead of the A.  Lesson learned?

Nope.  She engaged in a battle of wills with her Freshman English teacher and took a D at the end of the first term.  This is a kid that was reading the Harry Potter series (with great comprehension and enthusiasm) from grade one.  It wasn't ability, it was a choice to resist the teacher and his style.  Like the 6th grade issue, she refused to back down and took the hit; consciously, willingly and stubbornly.

My wife and I come from a stubborn lineage.  This must've had some evolutionary value back in the old country because we seriously have it in spades.

Anyway, it's difficult to know why our youngest wasn't hip to the lack of rewards for report card grades (she's the youngest of three and in her first year of middle school so, perhaps, she really didn't know).  Or, maybe she did know and was just being persistent and hopeful or, more ancestrally, stubborn.

There's a lot of literature on rewards in educational and psychological world.

I agree with this guy.

He has A LOT to say about this topic.

I don't need to read all of his books to know this.  I only have to look at myself to understand motivation and what makes my kids "tick".  

Purpose, Making a Contribution and Mastery (through ownership of the task).

More on this tomorrow as it relates to necessary risk-taking and trust...