The Kids Have it too Easy.

School is too easy for kids these days.  This is my Andy Rooney post.  In my day, we didn’t have inflatable earth balloons, and we didn’t have limos take us to lunch just for showing up to school every day…

Yes you heard me right, I saw and took pictures of students getting in a 30 foot Hummer limo to go to lunch.  Did they save a drowning child from a frozen lake?  Did they ace the SATs?  Is it the state championship football team?  Nope.  They showed up to school every day for a WHOLE SEMESTER! 

Just ridin' in a limo lookin' out the sunroof

Hmm…

I’ll get to the Earth balloon in a minute.

Yesterday, I met about 40 very nice kids as they boarded (I say boarded because the limo was closer to a yacht than a car), the limo in two trips and arrived at a Ruby Tuesday’s for lunch.  All paid for by the Eagle Mascot.  He has a fund that he has corporate sponsor donate to.  He then uses that money to put together events for the students, like the limo ride to lunch.  He’s a good guy.  And he's a Math teach at the school, so he really is doing double duty to help these kids along.  Although I have to rank this idea up there with Michell Rhee’s idea to pay students for attendance and good behavior.  It wasn’t her idea, per se, but she decided to implement it.  For the most part, however, I think she’s done a wonderful job shaking things up in DC, a perennially underperforming, and corrupt system.

The Osbourn Eagle, supporting the football team at the state championship game in December, also pays for limo rides to lunch for perfect attendance...

I suppose it’s a mentality, an Andy Rooney-esque way of saying, “in my day we didn’t need to get paid to go to school...we just went” [insert curmudgeonly frown, here]

And there’s evidence to support the notion that money isn’t a sufficient motivator for school performance, as NYC schools have found that their efforts to pay students to get higher AP scores have resulted in lower scores.  Ooops.

But let me offer my view on it.  Most extra credit is really about getting the student to try a little more.  It usually, as I remember it, isn’t actually tied to performance.  If you do it, at least coherently, you got the credit. 

As I remember it, though, the students who did it were the good students, and probably the least in need of the extra credit itself.  Those most in need of raising scores seemed to be the least likely to do it.  

I simply think that offering a reward for perfect attendance, is essentially rewarding the students that will have perfect attendance regardless of the proverbial carrot and stick.  I don’t think spending money on something like this gets the intended results.

Now if the intention is simply to reward these students and leave it at that, then fine.  But as I understood it, the idea was to prod some of the other students to come to school.  Not going to happen.  Just like the extra credit work in the biology class.  The D student is probably not going to bother with it.  But the A student is.  Funny thing.  Maybe I’m just making this all up in my head.

Let's think about the real world, then.  I’ve found that the best professionals are also the hardest working ones.  In any field.  When I worked in science labs several years ago, I found, rapidly, that I couldn’t compete with the work ethic of the kids below me, or the people above me.  I just didn’t love it enough.  It didn't take long to realize I was in the wrong profession.

Again, it’s like this contradictory idea.  You’d think the person most in need of buckling down and busting their ass to work harder (me in a lab) would be the one to do it.  But instead it’s the people already at the top.  I see the same in photojournalism.  The people who work the hardest are the best ones, with the best (most coveted) jobs or contracts.  You’d think it’d be the opposite, if you followed the logic of the pay for attendance and extra credit theories.  But it simply isn’t the case. 

Kobe Bryant, Jerry Rice, or Carl Lewis let anyone out-work them?  That's why they are/were the best at what they do.

When you reward for simple performance, like attendance, you inevitably increase the gap between the lowest and the highest.  Those least in need of positive reinforcement for “expected” tasks will inevitably receive those reinforcements, because it’s already a behavior they’ve adapted to. 

 Incentive is a very interesting topic, explored in a lot of different venues (Freakonomics (whose blog I just discovered and like so much I'm putting it permantly on the right, over there--->), and the Paradox of Choice (interesting video, here), are a couple, off the top of my head.

I could go on and on.  I don’t have any empirical data to back it up.  Just some observations.  Maybe the links above help... 

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have inflatable 17 foot earth balloons to help us with geography, we just learned it…[insert curmudgeonly frown, here...again]

Yes, Earth Adventure sent a guy with a 17 foot earth balloon to help elementary kids learn geography.  I thought this was cool.  I don’t have any problem with bringing better and more interesting tools to entice kids to learn. 

I stood in there (yes, we sat inside the balloon), and the kids all looked up in wonderment, while the Earth Adventure teacher, spoke about plate tectonics, bodies of water, and all that goes into making the earth what it is.  I can’t say how much soaked into the kids minds, but I’m sure they remembered something, and it was probably more fun than looking at the pull down map that never quite stays down, and never quite goes up when you want it….and usually with a snap-BANG!

But that’s how we learned it and maybe that’s why these new fangled computers, and inflatable balloons, and limo rides seem so cool to us.  It wasn’t even on the horizon, or an option.  So when we see what we didn’t have, there’s probably a little envy that I didn’t get to sit inside the earth, ride in a limo and eat a free lunch….all just for showing up.