Exit Slip 19/10/23

 The Alfie Kohn video we watched in class presents a relatively extreme view of the role of competition in children's lives, and while I agree with some of his points, I disagree with his characterization of competition as entirely negative. I agree that adults often encourage children to take competition too far and push it to the point where it creates unhealthy social dynamics. When children learn that winning is always the most important thing, they will definitely struggle to work with others and develop intrinsic motivation, but I think it is possible to engage in healthy competition when kids can think of winning as one of many goals to strive for during an activity. When students are solely focused on winning, they are likely to get very upset when they don't get the result they want out of a competition, but when they are also focused on learning and social connection and other benefits they can get out of competitive activities, they can have a healthy relationship with competition. In this case, losing is still disappointing but it doesn't make the time spent on an activity worthless, which is a much healthier attitude to have.

I also think that competition teaches kids valuable lessons about hard work and coping with failure. In any competitive activity, you need to put in consistent hard work to have a chance of winning, and this teaches kids about the value of hard work. When children work hard leading up to a competition and their performance reflects this, they learn about the benefits of working hard to achieve a goal. Competition also teaches students about delayed gratification – in order to win, you need to train consistently for a good amount of time leading up to a competition, and this can be hard to do when there are no immediate benefits to your training. Competition also teaches kids how to accept failure and manage their emotions when things don't go their way. While hard work will increase your chances of succeeding in competitions, there are many other factors at play and sometimes you will lose even after you've worked as hard as you can to prepare. In these scenarios, kids learn that life doesn't always go your way and they learn how to deal with things not going the way they want.

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