Prescriptive vs Personalized

Metaphors are important.

For too long, parenting and schooling has taken on the metaphor of the factory. At one time, this was convenient because factories are predictable. And therefore can be prescriptive.

The problem with the factory model is that life isn't predictable and so when we attempt to be overly prescriptive, things go awry.

Alfie Kohn explains in his book Unconditional Parenting that prescriptive parenting and teaching is a ruse:

I might as well warn you now: What follows will not be a step-by step recipe for How to Raise Good Kids. First of all, I would have to be a nearly perfect parent myself, which I'm not, before I presumed to offer other people a definitive, fail-safe guide to raising their children. Second, I have my doubts about the wisdom of such an approach in any case. Very specific suggestions ("When your child says x, you should stand at location y and use z tone of voice to utter the following sentence...) are disrespectful to parents and kids alike. Raising children is not like assembling a home theater system or preparing a casserole, such that you need only follow an expert's instructions to the letter. No one-size-fits-all formula can possibly work for every family, nor can it anticipate an infinite number of situations. Indeed, books that claim to offer such formulas, while eagerly sought by moms and dads desperate for a miracle cure, usually do more harm than good.

For some, the conditional nature of rewards and punishments have grown tiresome, and there are many teachers and parents who are eager for a new game plan.

However, making the leap from something as prescriptive as if this happens, say this, do that and stand there, to something that resembles less of an instruction booklet can be intimidating.

The factory metaphor is prescriptive and dehumanizing, and it has reached the end of its shelf life.

The organic metaphor is personalized and humanistic.

Rather than guiding our actions with an instruction book, we need to draw on good pedagogy. Here are two very powerful adages I use to guide my teaching and parenting:

Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

There is a big difference between doing things to children and working with them.

Because one-size-fits few, these adages play out in all sorts of different ways. Rather than standardizing our approach to working with children, they need our personalization.

Caring ally or judge in-waiting

I consider the relationships I have with my students and my daughter as being the most important part of being a teacher and a father.

Teachers who believe that their primary role is to dispense the curriculum content into their students' heads regardless of whether the students like the content or like the teacher are missing the point. Good teaching and good learning are inseperable from good relationships.

When teachers and parents choose to use rewards and punishments to manipulate children, we are playing a kind of Russian roullette - meaning, at some point, we will have to make good on our promise to actually use the reward or punishment.

When we trigger the reward or the punishment, it is awfully hard for our students or our children to see us as a caring ally who is on their team - rather, it is more likely that they will start to rationalize the relationship as 'us' and 'them'. They see us as a judge in-waiting who holds the carrot in one hand and the stick in the other.

If you want to determine if you have an 'us' versus 'them' relationship with kids, take the pronoun test. Listen to your kids to find out which pronouns they use to describe your relationship. Do your students describe the classroom as a 'we' or do the students see you as a 'them'? This kind of inclusive or exclusive language indicates more than just symantics.

In his book Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn offers this:

Those giants who hold me and rock me and feed me and kiss away my tears sometimes go out of their way to take away things I like, or make me feel unworthy, or hit me on the backside (even though they keep telling me I'm always supposed to "use my words"). They tell me they're acting this way because of something or other that I did, but all I know is now I'm not sure I can trust them or feel completely safe with them. I'd be pretty stupid to admit to them that I'm angry, or that I did something bad, because I've learned that I might be give a time-out or talked to in a voice that has all the loved drained out of it or even smacked. I'd better keep my distance.

That last sentence scares the hell out of me. I could not think of a greater indictment of a parent or teacher than if the chlild actually feels like they have to keep their distance because the parent or teacher encouraged them to do so. This is exactly what rewards and punishment do.

It would break my heart to know that I was responsible for creating a wedge between my students and me. And as bad as that may be, words couldn't even begin to describe how horrible I would feel if I did the same with my daughter.

If we really care about being a caring ally that is there for our children, that is there to work with our children, we have to purge our teaching and parenting tool-boxes of our rewards and punishments and interact with our children unconditionally.