Patrick Gann said:
Do As They Say, Not As I Do
Patrick, avid gamer and father of three, struggles to reconcile expert advice with his own instincts.
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Thank you so much for sharing this. Not only is a topic like this very personal because it involves both you and your son, it hinges on topics that a lot of people have very strong (and often uninformed, or at least unempathetic) opinions about. I hope the overall response is favorable, and I hope more people see your article as being helpful, rather than seeing it as a request for help.
I spend a lot of my time picking apart what and how kids learn, and there's a lot of guesswork being used. The unfortunate truth is that, whether a child is "normal" or "special-needs," a lot of people focus on short-term results instead of long-term growth and learning. They could all take a lesson from your experience.
In education, we have a tendency to overuse tangible incentives and heaps of praise. These "instant gratification" mechanics can, even in the minds of the so-called-normal students, act in the same way as videogames. Instead of raising the children in the real world, where there are both good and bad consequences for their choices, and the good is only so good, we create an "alternate world" for them in which they are shielded from the bad, and every small good is amplified.
The result? We teach
dependence. Students come to depend on us to constantly transform the real world into this fantasy world. By the time they get to me, they're middle schoolers -- just a stone's throw from adulthood, really. When we put responsibility on them, or put them in front of real challenges that call for real independence, many of them
fold. Even (or
especially) the "smart" ones, because it's harder to succeed with real tasks than it is to earn praise and rewards in the alternate world on which they're hooked.
Why do we still do it? Because it
feels positive. And because it get short-term results. You get the child to give you the behavior you want without a fight, so it must be a good thing... or so goes the thinking. When we measure learning purely by the
result, we often ignore endemic problems in the
process. We sweep them under the rug, for
next year's teacher to deal with.
Good parents (and those of us teacher who see students for more than one year at a time) realize early on that short-term results at the expense of long-term health are just not worth it. And intelligent gamers are learning not to react to every "anti-gaming" opinion as though it's automatically wrong for "attacking" our hobby. You're providing a great model for the intelligent gaming
parent.
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Going back to what this also means for the "neuronormal" kids out there, video games aren't unique. They do, however, represent the easiest-to-find example of what I consider Overly-Rewarding Environments. A few basic button pushes, and you've saved the world. Minimal effort, maximal reward. There are plenty of other experiences that we create to work in this way, so video games shouldn't be burning on that stake alone.
Are any of us surprised that people prefer those OREs to the real world? In the real world, I can put in a ton of effort, and the best I get is "nothing catastrophically fell apart." Compared to
Skyrim, it's easy to feel like that's somehow a failure. And I'm an adult! For me, that feeling is subconscious, but tightly controlled by a conscious mind that knows better. What about for kids, who don't yet have that knowledge?
