If We Seek to Learn, Our Schools and Our Attitudes Must Change by Paige Sumowski
School is built on the foundation of learning. We wake up early, go to school, sit down for nearly five hours and listen, so, when we leave school, we can do more work and get a good grade. Our focus has shifted. We have turned to a number to represent a student's intellectual worth, have gotten caught up in the thrills of bells and whistles, have forgotten why we get up at five in the morning, why we listen to our teachers speak, why we even go to school. Our motivations and methods, while created to encourage kids, have gotten in the way of the real goal: learning. When we tell students to study to pass the test, when we pressure students to do well on a final exam on the first day of school, while effective for provoking preparation, a detrimental motivation is established: getting a good grade. More often than not, when pressured into performing well on paper, students think more about the test on Friday, than what is actually on it, than what skills are required gain th...