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?"

Treat Your Students Like LeBron James

No I don't think that you should stop all media coverage of everything else for two weeks to give your students a lot of attention. That would be cool, but I am talking about the way the fans of Northeast Ohio have treated him. We should treat our students the same way.

We have all heard about the jersey burning and how upset fans were four years ago. Who would have thought that those same fans would be so forgiving? Do we forgive our students like that? I hope so.

Now my analogy has to stop at the rooting against James part. I admit that even I rooted against him at times. I am not suggesting that educators would ever do that.

What I am talking about is second chances. We need to make sure that our students are given second chances to perform academically and second chances in regards to behavior. We shouldn't judge our students by their behavior or one score on an assignment.

In LeBron's statement, he showed a lot of maturity. We forget that we watch our students mature every day. We should be patient to let that maturity develop. James' maturity may also have been helped by the fact that time heals all wounds.

Let's be honest, a lot of the forgiveness comes out of the fact that we think he will bring a championship to Ohio. James has already shown that he can succeed at the highest level. As educators, we need to give our students second, third, fourth, fifth or however many chances they need to succeed. Who knows, they may lead us to championships as well.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/3404618770/">Keith Allison</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>