Should we get what we want?
We never quite know where to draw the line with kids -- or with ourselves.
Sometimes, we have to give the kids what they want – the flashy, the interesting, the exciting – if we want to unlock motivation.
When I listened to Woo-Kyoung Ahn’s interview on this podcast a few weeks ago, I recognized a teacher who’s doing exactly that. She’s the professor who teaches the course at Yale called “Thinking,” which is one of the university’s most popular classes. It’s hard not to want to study psychology after just listening to her talk for half an hour. Moreover, as she described the assessment structure and design of the course, which focuses on identifying assumptions about how we think and then revealing the contrary truths about them, I started to identify that it wasn’t just the subject matter but also the way of teaching it that made Ahn’s class sound so exciting.
At the same time, I tend to bristle at these newly-popular classes called “Thinking” or “Happiness.” Though I’ve never had much reverence for distribution requirements – I took a course called “Exploring Math in Art” to rack up my college math credit – part of me wonders whether such a focused class does service to a generation that lacks discipline. Should students really be able to learn about recent studies in brain science that deliver their results about happiness without first knowing the brain science that led to those discoveries? But then I remember what I tell people when they learn that I teach a Contemporary American Poetry course at a school that doesn’t systematically teach Victorian or lyric or epic poetry, or conventional poetry at all: once you read a poem you care about, you have all the time in the world to find out what came before it. My grumpy old person and my hip, responsive teacher fight with each other.
It turns out that deciding what’s best for kids isn’t easy, even for people who think about this question all the time. In conversations, we often boil it down to debates whose names betray the bias of the speaker: “rigor vs. coddling,” “responsive vs. repressive,” and so on. We want students to be motivated by interesting course material, but we have to think about how to build the disciplines that help people to see their motivations through.
Starting with the interesting material can work well to invite students into that deeper understanding. Think about the ways that most people use Wikipedia. An example from my own life: you’re watching the Hulu documentary about Von Dutch and you hear the name of the brand’s one time designer, Christian Audigier. He’s a French fashion designer. Or was, you find out, when you read his Wikipedia page. You see that he died at 55 and you make assumptions about how, but then you read that he died from myelodysplastic syndrome. You click on that syndrome, because you’ve never heard about it before. Now you’re reading about blood diseases and disorders. You’re passionate about blood disorders; you must know how gene mutations happen. You are, like me, once again thinking, maybe I should’ve been a biologist.
But I didn’t become a biologist, did I?
Figuring out exactly how to mix together the intrinsic motivation of the Wikipedia rabbit hole with the durable work ethic to contextualize it is a complicated process, one that has to be constantly calibrated to the needs of the moment but which is also nearly impossible to pin down or systematize into policy.
Teaching on a team has, for me, thrown this truth into relief. In the way that coparents of a child must, I find myself, often, wondering how it’s possible that my colleague whose judgment I trust so well believes that a thesis statement in a short essay can be multiple sentences long when I believe that a student must always find a way to say it in just one. They struggle to understand that I think not knowing what’s going on is punishment enough for not completing the reading. Just this week, the six of us who co-teach our American Studies course had a conversation about late work that went something like this:
“What if we don’t take points off for late work.”
“I agree.”
“What are the consequences, then? We have to hold them accountable.”
“We make them meet with us when they’re late.”
“The day they’re late? Or sometime in the days to follow?”
“Every day.”
“A study hall with a faculty member to finish up the work.”
“Yeah, we want to ruin their lives, just not their GPAs.”
“And we’re finding the time to supervise that?”
“What if we did just one point per late day?”
Et cetera.
I think of these kinds of quandaries when I’m around my friends who have children. Like most millenials, many of my friends have approached parenthood thinking that they’d make their kids’ baby food, dress them in only cloth diapers, and avoid ever microwaving anything to reheat it. Like most humans, most of those friends haven’t realized those thoughts consistently. The needs of the moment, and their child, change. Occasionally, parents spoil their children with ice cream before dinner, because that’s what the kids want, and that’s what’s going to get them through.
What’s tricky about teaching is that the policies that we name in an effort to find a balance between best practices in motivation and introducing discipline can be interpreted as firm stances. As teachers, we know that what you say or do or decide communicates who you are and what you believe in; no one takes this transfer more seriously than teenagers. Change can be challenging to understand, because it seems like a shifting tide, even though realistically, the right answer to the question should kids get what they want? is never fixed.
But we have to remember that there isn’t an answer to the question of whether and when we should get what we want – we all know this to be true.