Today I re-learned a crucial lesson of teaching. The power of a compliment.
When I was in graduate school, one of the professors told us, a novice group of teaching assistants, that half the comments we write on a student’s paper should be compliments. He said that it is probably more important to reinforce positive writing skills than it is to correct mistakes in writing.
That comment has stayed with me. Many times I have gone back over a student’s paper, looking for areas of the essay to write in marginal compliments. The honest truth is that I have never met that professor’s goal of making sure that 50% of my comments on students’ papers are complimentary. The sad fact is that it is human nature for many of us is to find faults. If we look up at the ceiling tiles in a room, we often spot the one ceiling tile with a crack and ignore the other one hundred ceiling tiles in good condition. And if I am really honest with myself, the same that is true with me as a grader of students’ papers is true of myself as a parent. I am not going to ask my four children if I meet my professor’s 50% quota with them.
Which brings me to a painful moment today at the Scheiber Sandor School. I taught four classes in a row today—two seventh grade classes and two tenth grade classes. Sometime in that stretch, I arrived early to the next classroom where I would teach. As I walked into the room, a Scheiber Sandor teacher said to one of the seventh grade students, “You are not nice.” To which the student immediately responded, “Well, you are not nice either.” I am not passing judgement on the teacher because I have no idea the context of the incident. I clearly walked in at the end of something. I do not know the student or the teacher-student relationship. But it reminded me of my professor’s advice to make sure that 50% of the feedback I give students is positive. For the rest of my teaching that day, I went out of my way to praise students, hoping in some awkward logic to counterbalance what I heard the teacher say to the student. I was certainly mindful that part of my role at the school was to model positive teaching.
The uncomfortable incident was still on my mind when we were preparing to leave the school in mid-afternoon. Just minutes before I walked out of the building a Scheiber Sandor eighth grade student came up to me and told me that he remembered that I taught him last year.
“Really,” I responded. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.”
He kindly re-introduced himself to me. Then he said, “I remember you because you told me that I was sophisticated. I used the word deja vu and you told me that it was a sophisticated comment.”
Once he reminded me, the moment from last year came back. I remember telling him that many seventh graders in Baltimore would not use the word deja vu, let alone a seventh grader for whom English is a second language. As I walked out of the school, I thought of him carrying that compliment for a whole year without any sense that he would ever see me again and tell me how much my words meant to him.
I boarded the bus thinking of my professor’s mandate to make sure that half of the feedback I give students is positive. That Scheiber Sandor student who stopped me before I left today does not know that he has motivated me to return to Baltimore with a renewed commitment to the power of a compliment. My students and my children will benefit because of his kindness.
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