Candy in the Classroom: A Teacher’s Perspective
-By Mrs. Cahoon
I was at home washing my dishes using soap and hot water. I put them
in the dish drainer when they were clean. Then dried the dishes and stacked them in
the cupboards. I am sure at this point you are waiting for this story to come to some
grand conclusion. Maybe the dishes fell. Maybe I had a grand epiphany. Sorry to
disappoint you, but there is none. This was just a mundane task that I have to do
every day. Don’t worry there is a point coming. Did you notice how at the end of
my story, I did not have someone rewarding me for doing the job? Nobody was
there to hand me a blue ribbon. Nobody gave me a chocolate for performing my
task. It is just a job that I have to do every day. And someday, you will have to do
it as well. And you know what? There will be nobody there rewarding you with a
candy bar or a piece of candy.
So what does this have to do with you in the classroom? Up until this year, I
always kept a bag of Jolly Ranchers in my desk to throw (hand) students in order to
entice them to do something such as answer a question, read aloud, etc. This
summer I read an article from the blog 100 Days of Real Food. It went into great
detail about why we shouldn’t be rewarding students with food. The main point of
the article was that when we reward students with food, they lose the desire to
complete the job if the reward is no longer present. For instance, if a student is
given a candy for completing a worksheet, in theory, the student may not want to
complete the worksheet the next time unless they are offered the candy
again. Because I want my students to be productive members of society, I realized I
was actually harming my students by giving t