Last night was my 5th grade son’s parent-teacher conference. It’s amazing how these can make you feel like the greatest parent of all time, or the absolutely worst parent who ever entered the halls of the school building! (Note to all parents out there: you are the greatest parent for your kids, and sometimes you act like the worst parent-but your parenting is not the reason for your kids’ school performance! More on that a different day.)
My son has a lot of test anxiety. Last year, the teacher was amazing; he saw that my son was struggling and anxious around tests. He developed a plan to help my son slowly get used to taking the whole test, by allowing him to start with answering 2 questions and then adding 2 questions a week. By the end of the year, he was taking the whole test!
This year is a little different. This Rav explained that during the test period, my son could answer 2 or 3 questions, but then he needed to finish the test during other periods throughout the week; he would pull him out of math or English and help him finish the test. Something about that didn’t sit right with me….
And my husband launched into an explanation of his chinuch philosophy: for him, the most important thing is that our son loves Torah, has a good feeling around Torah, and it should not be treated like any other subject. The focus should not be on the tests! From our perspective, if our son enjoys the learning, feels good about it and has a good relationship with the Rav, that is a success!
The Rav’s perspective differed. He needs to get used to tests, he said. But it went even further: “if he gets a good grade on the test, he will have a good feeling about Gemara.” He makes sure all of his students get 90 or 100, even pulling them out of other classes to work with them!
Walking home with my husband later, I realized the essential difference between our approaches. The Rav’s approach is that the external reward given for a task (the grade, or it could be the prize or the praise) is what motivates someone to want to continue doing that task. Our approach maintains that it is the intrinsic connection with the task that makes a person want to continue doing it; be it the good relationship they have with the person motivating them, the good feeling in the environment while working on the task, the feeling of satisfaction from accomplishing, or the pure enjoyment of the task itself. And our view is backed up by research and just plain common sense. In fact, it was found in multiple studies that people who were just given external rewards to continue a task were actually LESS likely to want to continue to do the task again.
Doesn’t this make sense? Yes, external rewards sometimes help, and grades can be important indicators for both teacher and student to see progress. But would you want to continue a job that you hated, found too difficult or too easy, found monotonous or boring, or involved unfriendly co-workers or a really difficult boss, just because it paid fairly well? Or, to make the analogy even more acute, because you received good performance reviews?
My son doesn’t care about grades. He cares about feeling internally successful and happy and accomplished, connected to parents, friends and teachers, and enjoying what he is doing. Like any normal kid and human being. When it comes to Torah, and really all areas of life, isn’t that what we want for our kids?
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