I'm having a week of it, I know...but.....(school awards)

[Basketofchocolate]

I find it sad (but I do understand why) that DS comes home with acknowledgement that he is normal (all pupils get a sticker at end of term with one of 3 or 4 bland things on) i.e. he is one of the 3 or 4 things that every other child is. He didn't get a certificate for 100% attendance so that's just it. No recognition for his hard work for his academic achievements. Not even privately from the teachers.

I know he's still young (just finished Yr 1) but was wondering why school don't acknowledge it. He knows he's different and that he struggles in other areas, such as social skills so it seems sensible to praise in areas where he is doing well to help self-esteem.

We have told him we're very proud, etc. but....I don't know just having a week of annoyance with the school and stressing about next year already!

In reply

1. No.
   Unless you include instances where the school willingly does what it ought about specific, individual staff members who aren't up to scratch. Or where the school has been forced to do what it ought for a week or so before reverting.
2. No Again unless you mean minor material stuff like fencing off the grounds.

This is interesting. DS just finished year 6, he is I finally discover one of the most able in the class and well ahead in a couple of subjects. After years of watching the sporty types parade their trophies and certificates, and receiving encouraging "head teacher awards" for things he's not good at (but is deemed to have made an effort), DS was finally awarded a prize for achievement at leaver's assembly. It means the world to him as he was getting increasingly frustrated that nobody seemed to notice what he was good at.

Build up your DS self esteem in any other way you can, but I think it's the system. Probably a good idea to find a way of not getting stressed about it.

My view on this seems at odd with most on this thread. I would not have liked dd to be praised for her academic achievements at primary school. Yes, I would have liked the teachers to recognise she was ahead and teach her at that level, but not to give her rewards or certificates for it.

My reasoning for this would be:
I would not want her getting big headed

I would not want her to see herself as special because she was ahead, only to find as she moved into bigger and more academic ponds, she was no loner that special
I want her to see learning as a joy in itself

As she progresses, she does get UKMT certificates with varying degrees of success, but the point of doing them is still first for the love of doing the maths and hopefully she can see that for a child struggling to understand some aspect of maths, their progress to them is just as important as her UKMT certificate is to her.

Also, perhaps if society did not place such emphasis on top achievers in sport we would not have a society in which obesity and diabetes are endemic.

The way I feel about it is that first and foremost I want my children to spend their childhood shaping themselves, and being shaped by external forces (e.g. me, the school, friends etc) into the best adults they can be. So, that would be things like kind, honest, wise, level-headed, hardworking, loyal, mentally and physically healthy etc., etc.

Then secondly, but not at the expense of the first ambition, I want them to have a happy childhood. I'd rather they had happy adult hoods than happy childhoods, but I am aiming for both.

I strongly suspect that 99.9% of us want the same thing for our children.

So, the whole thread is about one tiny aspect of that... balancing the need to encourage our children to work hard, to have self-belief and to believe that they are valued members of society and think they have something worthwhile to offer.

If no one got any praise for anything, except hard work, then that would be one thing. Or if they were given the praise without the others in their class playing the role of the admiring crowd of onlookers. Except, if a child does well at anything except learning, they are praised by being given trophies on sports day and singled out in front of the entire class/ school at assemblies.

Neither of my children are especially sporty and they both have dysgraphia with the result that their art work embarrasses them. So what's left that they can be good at? Learning. if they do not merit a mention for that when it seems every other talent is worthy of endless praise, then what is the mention about how valued their talent is within the school?

then what is the message about how valued their talent is within the school?

God knows what's wrong with my brain ... I keep making typos like this!

I'd not considered it too much from that point var, I was thinking more that if they are only awarding efforts, then an academic child should be equally eligible if the school is challenging them.
Dds school doesn't really acknowledge pure effortless ability in individuals anyway, including sports. Unless of course it's something done out of school, or mixed team type stuff where they all stand a good chance.

However I do see your point, even at dds school most other raw abilities were acknowledged indirectly, kids bringing in their sports trophys and badges, brownies/ cubs badges, 3 cheers for schools 5 a side team etc, everyone seeing the best artwork on display, music and dance certificates etc. So having thought about it, I do get where you're coming from if something like English or maths etc is the one area your child has any chance to shine in or be acknowledged. Especially if the teaching doesn't allow for them to ever work hard in that subject and be acknowledged that way.
In short, me saying yeah, dd got acknowledged for extra curricular activities, being on mixed school teams, academic achievements that she did put lots of work into etc seems a bit 'I'm alright Jack' by comparison to the situation you appear to be in.

FWIW, I just asked dd her views on sports day and if she wished she could get more recognition for doing well in maths. Her answer was that she does keep getting told she is doing well and with sports day she liked it when her house won races. But as maths challenges are more fun than sports day, there should be a maths competition in the school where you can compete for your house.

I think, as with most things, it is a case of balance, of how much and how publically praise is given, so that the child feels their work is valued, but not that their cleverness dominates their view of themselves.

I have a (subjective) outlier. He finds most lessons easy. And if he doesn't find them easy, he has the ability and capability to learn what he has to learn to overcome any difficulties. Why should he get awards for stuff he finds easy? He will (all being well) get good exam results and do generally well academically-that is his reward. Far better to reward people who achieve even though it's more of a struggle.

"Far better to reward people who achieve even though it's more of a struggle."

Then following that logic, art competitions should be judged against time spent? Also, gold, silver and bronze race medal winners should be the ones who are most out of breath at the finishing line?

Ah- but I don't think of school work as a competition. Entering a competition is a very different thing to getting on with your school work.

And to add to var GCSEs, a-levels etc should be given on efforts?
A 10yr old can and should understand they'll do well when it gets to that point, but at 6 or so it's a long way off. Plus at that age I wouldn't have wanted to give dd the message that she was 'better' because her exam results would be in the future.
Adding to richmals dd's idea, my dds primary did the primary maths challenge and maths in motion national comps. The maths in motion teams were quite rightly mixed in school with a roughly even split, so every team had equal chance of being the best in school. And then best in school became the schools team. Dd and I both thought at different times that in addition to that, alongside any team having the chance to be best in school, the actual team to represent school should have been picked seperately from individuals same as a sports team would be.

I get the impression that there seems to be a presumption that IQ has a correlation of 1 with exam success, which is turn is highly correlated with career success. Therefore children with a high IQ should not be encouraged in the way that the other children are since they've got an unfair advantage - a sort of positive discrimination in favour of less able children??

IME the first correlation is nothing like 1, and the second correlation is very weak indeed. But even if it was true, I don't think discriminating against any group of children is justifiable. Vhildren are children and they all need to feel valued as individuals (and they also deserve to be challenged at school) irrespective of their IQ.

Lurking!

"Therefore children with a high IQ should not be encouraged in the way that the other children are since they've got an unfair advantage - a sort of positive discrimination in favour of less able children??"

That's certainly not what I'm saying. Of course they should be encouraged. All children should. But they do have an advantage. Not an unfair one- but definitely an advantage.

And no, not positive discrimination in favour of less able children. But in a world of limited resources, sometimes hard choices have to be made. And I would frankly, for the good of society at large, prefer that the less able children get the support they need, even if it means my able children get a bit less. Because they are already advantaged.

I wasn't directing that comment at you, BR, more at certain teachers that DS1 and DS2 have had. However, your views are interesting.

Both DCs were academic and both got plenty of awards throughout their school careers. I don't understand schools that don't reward academic excellence.

I'm not very comfortable with the idea of academic awards or rankings for very young children as academic ability and achievement can change so much over elementary school. The early years to me are largely about learning to cope with school, how to behave, how to concentrate etc, and I think that it's effort in those areas that should be commended. I also think that there should be no homework.

Perhaps that's because my highly intelligent child really struggled with school in the first few years, partly simply because he was young in year. He needed his 'sat still for half an hour' /'didn't throw a wobbly at being told to change task' stickers in a way that my dd, who has an early September birthday, and found everything about school super easy really really didn't. She knew that she was good at everything - surely it's fairly obvious when you get all the answers right?

Later on when ds was given work from the higher year groups he was very proud because he knew that he was unusual. He didn't need that pointed out to him, doing work a year or two ahead and still getting all the answers right surely provides validation in of itself?

Also now my children are in a system that does award academic achievement I'm aware that it can be a double edged sword. So my children (not in the UK any more) get a running total of all their marks and the whole class comparator (as do I). At the end of term if they get a certain % they get an award, and if they maintain that mark they get an assembly, a certificate and their names in the local paper. If they can do that throughout high school they get a bursary for university.

ds who has always been self motivated (not always in doing what the teachers have wanted!) has discovered as a teenager that he can get high marks and he likes the acknowledgment. It's a new motivator and that's great. On the other hand dd has been on the highest list (90%+ average) for several years and it is a source of massive stress. If she thinks she's likely to drop marks she gets very very upset, to the extent that she gets migraines.

Oh and the children in the sports teams still get the most kudos. It's a sporty sort of school, and sporting success is I think much more visible and reflects somehow more on the school than individuals getting high scores. Plus sporting success can get your university education paid for, so it really matters here. Still sucks a bit for the non-sporty (our family included) of course, but it does take a lot of effort to succeed in sports.

I know of state primary schools near me that do reward academic achievement, with house points, merits, end of year awards etc. and obviously the private schools do.

I think most schools do housepoints or something similar. I think the OP is talking about something bigger than that.

Var- what do you mean my views are "interesting"? Is that like a decision being "courageous"?

BR, well I take a different slant from you on things, but no, I actually meant interesting. Its nice and self-affirming when someone agrees with you, but more interesting when they explain an alternative view.

Let's face it, neither of us has any more say than the other on what actually happens, nor on policy for how budgets are raised and spent. (Unless you do have some influence??) So, any conversation is merely theoretical.

Validation is such a tricky one, as I think it depends very much on the individual child as you say, Nooka.

In reception, DD was quite happy to read and write off her own bat, and didn't need any outside praise to do that. But what she found hard about school was that other children were getting lots of praise and attention for doing things that she found easy, whereas she got none at all whatever she did. (We were then very lucky to get a Yr1 teacher who let her show what she could do in class and all was well for a year).

Now - Yr4 - she's much more aware of meaningless praise. DH congratulated her on doing well in her spellings last term, and got a tongue lashing in response, because the spellings were so easy that she hadn't actually done well in getting them all right. Which I have to say I agreed with.

I think it's possible to actually award able children without it either being worthless or demoralising for others. Dds school managed it so it's clearly not impractical.

"what she found hard about school was that other children were getting lots of praise and attention for doing things that she found easy, whereas she got none at all whatever she did."

This was what Ds1 got really down about in year 6. He was having a hard time with the teacher, so it wasn't on its own, but when he was looking around for something to help him with his feelings about the teacher's criticisms, he found that nothing he did was worthy of praise.

(Not relevant but the class teacher's approach was to nag him into better handwriting by being critical. She was unrelenting about it. One day she'd tell him to write faster so he could write more and the next day she'd scold and tell him to write slowly to help with legibility. It led to him being diagnosed with dysgraphia - to which the teacher's only response was "they've got a name for everything these days". She was also the SENCO!).

As I understand it, the thing that causes depression is if you try and fail, then you try harder and fail again, then you keep going getting more and more desperate but failing every time. Then depression sets in and if its severe enough, it won't lift even if the root cause completely disappears.

That is why I worry when my children stress when they repeatedly try and fail to join the class/ school reward scheme. The teacher's know that the work is not demanding for them, so all they can do is try to be perfect. Ds1 shows clear signs of perfectionism that is distressing for me to watch and I do not recall being there prior to Y6.

And I think too the perfectionist streak is enhanced by never getting the easy stuff wrong, so when they do make mistakes they don't know how to deal with them positively as its not part of their usual routine. Something I would blame entirely on teaching not practicality.