Scoring is Scoring!

During our last class of the semester we talked about Failure Models and Professor Runte talked to us about the students that were challenged to put as many balls into the garbage can as possible. Runte told us about how the mothers of the children who stood close to the basket were crying and feeling like they were failures as mothers. But I really must question this over reaction to the children out smarting the game.

I have to question us, as students- if we had a test and we could choose to use our notes and books would we? or would we use just use our brain? I feel like this is a similar situation. We can make it easier for ourselves to achieve better or we can try to stick to the norms of test taking and only use our brain. Especially as education students I feel that we would want to do our best and go for the "A".

I think that the mothers of those students should have not been upset, proud if anything. Creative ways of thinking should not be punished and honestly, they were being intelligent about the best way to get the reward. If the function is to get from point A to point C do you have to go to point B first?

I have read in a few different articles that state that education is stunting creativity in our students/kids and I think that this is a prime example. Why can't students do the same activity in different ways, if it is all about the product what does the process matter? I think that with some things there are only one way or maybe a few but with some things, when there are few restrictions, why can't there be multiple ways of doing things. And furthermore, why does one or more of them have to be wrong.

I wonder why some of the mothers (and please note that mothers was stated, not parents or fathers) responded the way they did. I question if there was one mother that was over sensitive (to put it politely) that did not like that her child wasn't doing exactly what every other child was and was upset by that. What if that was an influence on the other mothers, seeing that that mother felt she was a failure for something completely different. I am not sure if the mothers were shown individually to be honest, if they were than this could not be a factor, but had they been in a group then maybe it could.

I think one of the current issues with our education system is that we don't necessarily accept different processes to the same goal. We have to only get there the one way, I can understand that some subjects don't necessarily leave a lot of room for variation but there are subjects that have a lot of room, e.g. language arts, social studies and more.

Creativity is an important part of every child, I can honestly admit that I am not creative. I like the step by step process, I don't really think of creative things (I am sure you have all noticed throughout my blog).

I think the parents needed to just realize that these kids thought through the concept of what needed to happen to get the reward and the best way to do it. Hats off to those kids deciding they wanted the most chocolate bars possible or the most success at getting the ball in the garbage can and then solving the best way to have a high percentage shot or the best way to get the most candy.