Reward Practice, Not Performance

I am helping my son practice for his math test and it's making me think about the way we grade and reward performance in learning settings. He is struggling because, mostly because due to his ADD profile, he is a lot slower than other students. This means that there is a very real limit on what and how much we can practice in any given day. At some point, he's just "through with it" and nothing useful will come of keeping on.

We try to break things down into shorter practice sessions and use different ways of interacting with the material. In the evening, we do less problem solving and more talking about methodology. How do you resolve exponents and parentheses, how do you multiply numbers with exponents, how do you solve an equation. I have him write less in the evening, too, because writing is an added strain on his resources that doesn't necessarily contribute to the learning goal.

Anyway, I worry that he will feel demotivated if he gets a bad grade and it makes me a little angry that the grade is all that matters. We don't really reward effort or persistence. We give positive reinforcement to the students who solve the problems easily but we never encourage those who, despite their struggles and failings, are willing to return to the table and try again.

We keep on doing this in schools, all the while most of life is about exactly that kind of persistence. If you are willing to try again, practice again, tinker it out, you will eventually master the problem and learn what you are supposed to learn.

So I told him:

“Look, I don't care what grade you get. All I care about is that you keep practising. Your grades will catch up if you keep showing up to put in the effort. It might feel unfair that you have to make more of an effort than other students but trust me, in life, persistence and the willingness to put in the effort are like superpowers because guess what: It gets hard for everyone eventually. And when it does, you'd better have learned how to work through that.”

In the meantime, I help him practice and hope for the best.