WOULD YOU REWARD YOUR KIDS WITH CAKES OR CAIN?

Franca is a lady with an unusual passion. During my undergraduate days she’d come asking that I organize tutorials for her because everything she heard our lecturers explained in class appeared completely abstruse. It was through my intervention in the form of tutorials that she gradually began to pick some of the bits and pieces of what our lecturers said in class. Although my intervention proved positive it was seriously marred by its timing.

I recently pondered on my influence in shaping Franca academically and discovered that I unintentionally built a reward system that helped me produced the result I did. Roman lyric poet, Horace recommended rewarding a child with cakes. Erasmus tells of an English man who tried to teach his son Greek and Latin without punishment. He taught his son to use a bow and arrow and set up targets in the shape of Greek and Latin letters, rewarding each hit with a cherry. Every reward that a child sees ahead has the capacity to trigger zeal, but has the limiting of a child to formal and decorous atmosphere always produced great results? The answer is yes and no! I have had quite a number of chats with some senior citizens and most of them have told me weird stories of how they learned under strict conditions. Well, the shape of their character aided the results that they had. Today, the average child appears hedonistic so bringing the tradition of decades ago could mean failure. Lisa, a grade 7 student has been observed by me on a number of occasions. Whenever I visit her parents I always hear her math teacher barking because of ‘silly’ math mistakes she makes in school that always bring her grades down. Lisa appears completely impervious to the corrections of her math teacher even when she wishes that the violent barks of her teacher come to an end one day.

Most psychologists agree that reward is always better than punishment, but a few of them since the 1960s have maintained that reward is often as harmful as punishment. No matter the side you support the fact that the human mind is enormously complex cannot be denied. Thus, drawing a single conclusion would be wrong. I once offered to teach a widow’s child for free when I discovered that paying for the tuition of her child was a serious challenge. My first class was phenomenal, but as our classes progressed, I got a big mess from the widow’s daughter. She was simply making a joke of a class I usually charge $50 per class. When I observed this trend, I stopped teaching the girl for a while. After she noticed a hiatus, she started pestering me to teach her. What simply happened was that I made her realize the value of what she made a mess of. Whatever you don’t place value on is likely to be disparaged. The use of reward has positive effects, but the big question is when and how should it be used? It basically lies in your capacity to use discretion based on the behavioural make-up of the child.