Member-only story
How Much Do You Clap?
For me, it is zero, one, or fifty
What is my clapping policy?
Fifty claps for everyone!
I’m not your teacher. I’m not grading your essay.
When I was in middle and high school, I both loved and hated getting a test or an assignment back. There was so much drama around points. Each question was worth a certain amount of points, and points could be taken off for this or that. Points could be added too when I went after the extra credit. Our job as students was to divine what the teacher wanted and then produce it. Their job was to judge our work and let us know on a scale of one to a hundred how close we fit to their standard. I loved getting points, and I hated when I missed getting points.
As a Montessori teacher now, I seldom have to grade my students on a scale of one to a hundred. I’m glad for this. I think grades distort and undermine intrinsic motivation to learn. Alfie Kohn is one of my heroes. His book, Punished by Rewards, upended my perspective on my own educational experience and reaffirmed my commitment to Montessori ideals. His thesis is that you might be able to change a person’s behavior in the short term with rewards and punishments, but in the long term, they kill internal motivation. Rewards might be useful to get us to do things that we wouldn’t normally want to do, but for learning they…
