I recently helped my eight-year old daughter learn one of education’s greatest lessons – the importance of cramming for a test. Well, not exactly cramming. Its not like I had her up until 3:00 AM memorizing her multiplication or something crazy. I might be a bad enough parent to let her fall behind on her math homework, but I am at least a good enough parent to keep her bedtime enforced. I mean, I’m not going to let her inability to keep on track with her studies interfere my quiet time after the kids are in bed. That is my time. Anyway, she did learn the lesson of how important it is to keep up with your work, but now I need to make a decision on how to reward her for it.
To set the scene, she has a math workbook that she is supposed to do a few pages in each week to keep up with what they are learning in school. Every so often her teacher will send out an email saying which page she can be expected to work up until. We did a much better job making sure she was keeping on pace earlier in the school year. Then life happens, and mostly Christmas break happens. Shortly after the new year, her teacher sent out an email saying the test was in a two weeks and that it would be on anything up to page fifty-something in the workbook. Much to my surprise, my daughter was about twenty pages behind.
I say “to my surprise”, because I don’t think my daughter was that surprised. I think she was well aware of the lack of workbook progress that had fallen completely off my radar. Not that I would have really expected her to do math homework over Christmas break. Summer break, yes, gotta stay sharp. But Christmas break? Who can be expected to focus on math with so much whimsy in the air?
After getting back on track with doing a few pages each night, there was still ground to to make up. Luckily for her, while the whimsy of Christmas was no longer in the air, the dismal cold of winter was. On the week of her test she had a snow and/or cold weather day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday after being off for MLK Day on Monday. Her teacher pushed the test back a week. (Please feel free to insert your own comment on going to school in the cold and the show in your day.) She caught up. She took the test. She waited for the score.
She came home from school and rushed to tell me what she got – with a big smile on her face. She got a 96%. I congratulated her and told her I was proud of her, but caught myself and made sure I told her I was proud of her for putting in the effort to get caught up on her homework – not just the score. In the moment, it felt like the right thing to do. I wanted to emphasize the importance of work that went into the result, and make sure to celebrate that. But the more I think about it, I wonder if the more important thing to celebrate is the effort or the result?
The fatherly side of me says of course you need to celebrate the effort. Positive reinforcement along the way helps kids learn anything. Especially when trying to train a desired behavior. When our kids were little we’d give them a single mini marshmallow just for trying to go on the toilet, and that worked pretty well. But for some reason, this feels different. I don’t know if it is because my daughter is older now, or because there is a tangible grade associated with the outcome of the effort, but I’m not sure celebrating the effort is enough.
What if she put in the same amount of effort but got a 70% or something like that? Or what if she didn’t end up getting caught up with her work but still got a 96%? While the father in me wants to reward the effort, the competitor in me wants to point to the scoreboard. I generally think Star Wars is pretty lame, but I have to say that “Do or do not, there is no try,” is a solid bit of wisdom.
Even beyond a math test, what happens when it comes time to tryout for something? If she puts in a lot of effort but doesn’t make the cut, do we celebrate that just as much as if she half-assed the process but still makes the team or cast or whatever is? Not that I want to raise any of my kids to be lazy or anything, but I absolutely do want them to understand the results matter. But if I put too much focus on results now, will I stress them out and create little perfectionists? It can be a slippery slope from playing catch up on math homework in the third grade to being so excited, so excited, so scared in high school.
Like all else in life, the right answer is probably striking a balance. Focus more on the effort now while they are young – whatever the academic equivalent of mini marshmallows for potty training is. Build that as the foundation now so that once they get older I can pivot to effort being important, but only as a means of getting the result. Hopefully by the time my kids are in high school putting in the effort will be their default setting, allowing them to focus on the outcome and rely on muscle memory for the rest.
I have a feeling that getting my kids to the point where putting in the effort is a baseline will take some effort of my own. Part of my 6 year-old daughter’s homework every week involves cutting out a few high frequency word flash cards, and even getting her to do that is a struggle. I’m pretty sure she is at least a week or two behind. And now that I am thinking about it, I’m not sure that my older daughter has done more than a page or two in her math workbook since her test. I feel another cram session coming on.
Perhaps I’ve so thoroughly completed my pivot to only caring about the result, that I need to work backwards and put in more effort to make sure my kids are putting in for effort? If I can’t get my kid to put in the effort to cut out a few flashcards, is that a her issue or a me issue? Basic scissor use and story problems don’t seem like the best use of a motivational speech, but perhaps I need to give it a shot. They may take your lives, but they’ll never take your fractions!
I Think Therefore I Dad 