Polly Wanna Cracker?

Coming from a science background I tend to have a cost-benefit perspective. This basic biological concept states that an action will be taken if the benefit outweighs the cost. The difficult job in teaching is trying to present the case to students that the benefit of day-to-day education outweighs the cost of boredom, difficulty, or whatever terms they associate with school. In dealing mostly with freshmen, it is difficult to get them to see past the day. The problem with temporal vision is that education is an investment, which may not gain interest until years down the road; without immediate application, many students see no benefit. When one asks Polly to do a trick for a cracker, she may do it, but trying to convince Polly that if she does a trick now she will get two crackers tomorrow is a difficult task. Few, if any, of our students go home and immediately reap the benefits of science, math, history, and literature.
Physical rewards can be helpful, but they are temporary. Unless those AR points hook them into wanting to read for nothing more than personal pleasure or development, then at the end of the day they are useless. The other dark side of the coin is penalties.
As the year comes to an end, our students (and I admit some teachers) slowly turn into some kind of wild, summer-induced animals, in which issues of discipline in the classroom become more difficult. For students who care about grades and finals, the reins are still held, but those who have discovered the fact that they will not pass, school has become nothing more than a place to hang-out. How do you control a student who fears no repercussion? Their grades? They don’t care. Time-Out? They don’t care. Phone call home? They don’t care. The only way to avoid this scenario depends on what you have done from the start—structure, consistency, and relationships. Structure and consistency gives the students the groove to move in, and a caring relationship makes them not want to leave that groove. Trying to discipline now is like trying to make a horse stop bucking by hitting it with a stick. The great thing about teaching, though, is that with each day and year we have a new opportunity.