Alfie Kohn

Forced Courses in Schools are Detrimental to a Student’s Learning It is not hard to find a student that claims to hate high school. Students may just dislike getting up before 10:00 four or five days out of the week and having to do mountains of homework, but there are also the students who hate high schools because of the lack of fine arts classes or the fact that they are forced to take classes on subjects they don’t need or want, as the subject will not be useful or pertain to that student’s…

To Grade or Not to Grade? “The real threat to excellence is not grade inflation at all; it is grades.” –Alfie Kohn, The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation Sullen-eyed, sleepless zombies stagger throughout the endless corridors. Their minds remain blank, except for their one goal: the biggest, juiciest brains. These brains are what they live for. They would do anything for them. The one issue is that they are not zombies at all. They are twenty-first century students.…

1b. Note something in the reading that confirmed the ideas you had about students, adolescents, or teachers. On page 113, Jones refers to book written by Alfie Kohn (1996) Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and highlights that “there are serious disadvantages associated with too heavy an emphasis on rewarding behavior, especially behavior that many…

Paper 5 In today’s world, nothing is more important than the success and education of our youth. Without it, our nation as a whole would surely amount to little if not nothing at all. Their decisions and future achievements are huge factors that indirectly affect the way our country develops. That’s scary to think about. Right? Well luckily enough for us, we have highly skilled and trained educators set in place to help the students of today achieve all they are capable of and more. Since the…

A long-standing practice in the school system, which continues to exist today, is homework. As the pressure increases for higher levels of learning with higher standards and new testing from the state, the concept of homework continues to be part of the school system. Our family structures have changed and yet homework is structured in the same manner as it has been for the last 100 years. In the past, homework was given to students who arrived home to mom for an after school snack, a…

"Believing we can improve schooling with more tests is like believing you can make yourself grow taller by measuring your height" (Students Against Testing). All students that attend a public school in the United States are required to take standardized tests starting in third grade. Then those students have to take at least two a year until they enter high school, and once in high school students have to continue taking the same type of tests along with other standardized tests such as AP tests…

o Fritz Redl and William Wattenberg believe that behavior is shaped when a student is in a group versus individually. When they are in a group, they are more likely to misbehave due to group dynamics and the environment around them. This can be due to peer pressure and just the act of being with a friend. You are more likely to talk to them. They believe that teachers should not use punishment very often and in a pleasant way, but use positive and encouraging words and ideas to help the student…

Standardized testing is an important factor in the American school system. The methodology was first created in China, where they tested the knowledge of people applying to government jobs, but the examinations in the Western world are used as a convenient way for the government to quickly test large numbers of students in order to determine who is prepared to further their education and how good of a job schools are doing. The ACT and the SAT tests have become one of the biggest elements that…

looking into topics or activities that interest them, they will naturally educate themselves on that particular subject. However, this does not mean that homework is not needed, for it teaches children to learn how to educate themselves in that way. Alfie Kohn, an opposer to homework, says that "Telling kids how much and how long they have to read is an excellent strategy for making kids hate reading”. Although some homework assignments may seem forced upon students, at a young age these daily…

Your apprehension over the subject matter of the novels being read in class is well founded and understandable. It is in the very nature of a parent to wish to protect his child, especially in the ever-impressionable teenage years, from “truculence,” “sexism,” and “antisocial ideas.” However, the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as every other novel read in an English class, not only has literary value, but is fundamental in exposing children to the realities of the world, harsh or…