Night and Day

Yesterday was so much better!  Hunter was a willing student and I helped him in ways that didn’t change what he learned.  He does not like to sound words out, and this might be something we work on in a different way, but I decided to let it go for Headsprout.  When he hesitated, I told him the word and then he didn’t get so flustered.

Also, he does not like the repetition in the program and reading a paragraph three or four times in a row, so I took a turn.  He liked this.  At first, I thought that he wouldn’t learn all the words in the story, but he did.  He flew through it and learned all the words since there is so much repetition in the story.  For example, the word “wonder” was in the story at least a dozen times.

I’m glad I followed my instincts that he CAN do it but just didn’t want to.  It’s hard to tell sometimes, but I had this sense that he was just trying to get out of it (in the most frustrating way too).  Last night before bed, he said, “I want to do Headsprout tomorrow.”  Maybe he is excited to finish.  I know I am!  One more lesson and he is done!

By the way, thank you for the replies and emails.  It might be a shock that I’m pushing so hard after having such a relaxed attitude about homeschooling for a while now.  Last night I remembered something from “Nurture Shock” and the chapter called “The Inverse Power of Praise” and I think it is worth considering.   Headsprout has too much praise built into the program.  All of this praise has not helped Hunter’s confidence with reading, however, pushing him and our big talk seems to have renewed his determination.  Read on:

Brushing aside failure, and just focusing on the positive, isn’t the norm all over the world. A young scholar at the University of Illinois, Dr. Florrie Ng, reproduced Dweck’s paradigm with fifth-graders both in Illinois and in Hong Kong. Ng added an interesting dimension to the experiment.Rather than having the kids take the short IQ tests at their school, the children’s mothers brought them to the scholars’ offices on campus (both in Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Hong Kong). While the moms sat in the waiting room, half the kids were randomly given the really hard test, where they could get only about half right—inducing a sense of failure.

At that point, the kids were given a five-minute break before the second test, and the moms were allowed into the testing room to talk with their child. On the way in, the moms were told their child’s actual raw score and were told a lie—that this score represented a below-average result. Hidden cameras recorded the five-minute interaction between mother and child.

The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the minutes were spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, “You didn’t concentrate when doing it,” and “Let’s look over your test.” The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance.

After the break, the Chinese kids’ scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans. The trade-off here would seem to be that the Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel—but that stereotype may not reflect modern parenting in Hong Kong. Nor was it quite what Ng saw on the videotapes. While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices).

After reading Carol Dweck’s research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was that the mindset Dweck wants students to have—a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder—sounds awfully clichéd: try, try again. But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology.

People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located this neural network running through the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. This circuit monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success] on the horizon.”While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit? Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.” That sold me. I’d thought “praise junkie” was just an expression—but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son’s brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.

He did it!