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| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
Here at my school we are currently in the process of preparing
for the year-end award ceremonies. There is a long list of awards the Principal
wants us to give out at our awards ceremony on Monday. The list is long because
my Principal has a philosophy of making as many students feel special as
possible.
While I understand why she would want to recognize as many
students as possible, I see two problems with this approach. The first problem
is the lowering of the standard students have to reach in order to gain
recognition. When a student can get an academic award with a low B average and
two or three C’s on his or her report card, all that does is reward mediocre
work.
The second problem is that while the majority of the students
wind up receiving some sort of award, there are still a number of students who
don’t receive anything. Considering how little it takes to get an award, and
everyone knows how little it takes, what is says is that these students not
receiving awards must be very low achievers.
Which is the better choice: to recognize the few students who
actually excel and truly deserve recognition for their superlative effort, or
to recognize all but a few and point out the few, through omission, as
failures. My personal feeling on this is that it is better to recognize the
superlative few and encourage the larger number of students to work towards
joining their ranks rather than leaving out the lowest few and trying to
encourage them to rise from being failures to being at least mediocre.
In the movie THE
INCREDIBLES, the hero’s nemesis, Syndrome, pointed out that when everyone
is special then no one is. That lesson seems to have been lost on today’s
school administrators.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
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