Thursday, July 24, 2014

What did you learn?


4-H interview judging, it can mean many things to different kids and adults. Lots of hard work and sometimes last-minute changes with an occasional family disagreement thrown in for good measure. For those of you reading this that are not familiar, interview judging is when adults volunteer their time to judge a 4-H exhibitor's book work portion of their project and of course assign them a score. I have volunteered my time for over 10 years. I love interacting with the kids and learning more about and from them.

This year was different for me though. After a conversation with a friend about a different topic, I realized that we are doing some things wrong. One thing he said was that he was never very competitive because "My approach was to learn something. What could I take away from today that I can use in the real world?" Yeah. How can this help me in the real world? What a concept.

Parents, students and teachers have become so obsessed with the with scores that we have forgotten about the learning. A letter grade, a ribbon, an award shouldn't matter. The learning should matter.

At the end of judging, a grading period or the fair, instead of asking our kids, "What did you get?", we should ask, "What did you learn?"

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