As teachers and as parents, what kind of children do we want to raise?

• The child paralyzed by fear or the child challenged by hope?
• The child who easily loses confidence when confronted by alternatives or the child who grows in confidence with each new challenge?
• The child who views every new experience as an opportunity to fail or the child who views every new experience as an opportunity to succeed?

We all want our children to become successful, but more important is that we want our children to take advantage of opportunities for success.  This state of mind needs to be taught directly to students so that they view the world as an exciting series of alternatives rather than a gloomy condition of failure.  We want our children to wake up each day with a fresh start, not a reminder of yesterday’s failures or inadequacies.

Social scientists have long studied the benefits of positive attitude for increased problem-solving skills, stress reduction, better relationships, resilience, improved productivity and even better physical and emotional health.  Literature abounds with stories about differences between the Negative Nancys or Positive Petes in the world.  It would not be difficult for teachers and parents to find stories in which positive attitude prevails.  In fact, I would argue that all great literary works are stories of the conflicts between a positive and a negative attitude in characters.

This is not to say that children who feel challenged or uncertain about success should be dismissed.  Childhood by its nature is a state of inexperience and we don’t want failure drilled into our children with the mindless drone of “Yes, you can!”.

But at the same time, it is important that children understand the ramifications of the ways they view the world.    Successful people can have insecurities about their abilities to rise to the next challenge, but successful people also do not give up when confronted by failure.  We want our children to view the world as their oyster, ready to make sweet music from the cacophony that surrounds.

Teachers can help by assessing positive attitude in the classroom.  In our experience, grades for positive attitude are often subjective and best determined through student self-assessment surveys and questionnaires (e.g. “I enjoy and look forward to new challenges”).  The resulting grade for the singular category of “positive attitude” is a grade that compares the results of the self-assessment with other students in the class group.   Tools using self-assessment can make it easier to identify the outliers- those with too negative (or sometimes, too positive!) an attitude.  The resulting conversation between teacher and parent gets to the core of a child’s view of the world and the challenges that exist around it.  This information can be used convincingly in parent conferences to help a parent determine the character of their child’s attitude about life.

We welcome you to the conversation.  Please let us know that you care by liking comments, forwarding posts, or joining in our dialogue at johnzurn.com.

Coming Next Wednesday- How to Grade for Flexibility

From our first posting:

“As parents and teachers, we need to reclaim our traditional role as influencers of our children – not by shouting louder than the influencers our children discover online, but by stressing ideas that are more important than fancy shoes and snappy TikTok tunes. We need to emphasize traits that everyone agrees children will honor.  We need to convince our children that the people who are most important to them have a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in life.”

#charactereducation #successtraits #parentingtips #homeschooling #teachertips