One cannot hate something and do it well at the same time.
Not paying attention to the nurturing elements of the environment, but only subjectively requiring children to be "hardworking" is as unjustified as thinking you can grab a bunch of money out of the air, and is a typical materialistic approach.
What I want to talk about under this topic is precisely how to train children to study hard.
One of the most popular concepts about learning has always been "study hard". Many parents instill this concept in their children from the time they are young, asking them to "work hard" at a young age. Many parents nag their children before they go to school, saying that they can't play as much as they want and that they have to study hard. Once the child is in school, he or she is constantly taught to "work hard" in school and is required to do so in specific learning activities in order to develop a good attitude toward learning.
I think it is necessary to train children to be diligent and hardworking in their studies, but using the words and ideas of "hard work" to require children is often doing the opposite.
When it comes to the learning attitude of "hard work" or "suffering", we are accustomed to appreciate the spirit of perseverance that it expresses and always ignore the unpleasant "bitterness" that it contains. The taste of "bitterness" is always overlooked. As adults, when considering the cause and effect of a problem, we will endure the pain of the process for the sake of the result. Extending this experience to a child, asking him to accept the bitterness of the learning process in exchange for the sweetness of academic achievement - such thinking is logically flawless, but it can easily turn into a bad implication when it comes to children.
By associating "learning" with an uncomfortable "bitter" feeling, it can cause the child to feel slightly unhappy when thinking about learning. Who likes bitterness? A person who "suffers" for a certain goal must be based on sufficient reason and perseverance. This kind of rationality and perseverance is not something that even adults have or can afford to do, and it is even more inappropriate to require it of children.
It is human nature to avoid suffering and seek happiness, and this is especially true for children. If something feels "sweet", he likes it, and if it feels "bitter", he hates it.
We originally want our children to enjoy learning, but we make the learning process into a bitter bun, and only envision the result as a sweet pie, asking our children to eat the bitter bun every day to think about the sweet pie - the process is concrete and real with our children every day, but the goal is so far away that it is illusory. When the child gets bored in swallowing the bitter bun, he is criticized as "not hardworking" and is asked to suppress the real "bitterness" with the imaginary "sweetness". The child does not have the ability to refute the adult's teaching, he just feels the disharmony, his own powerlessness, and his deep-seated hatred of "bitterness".
One cannot hate something and do it well at the same time.
It is said that during World War II, one of the best Swiss watchmakers was coerced into making a batch of high-quality watches for the Nazis. Despite all his efforts, he was never able to do it to the same level as before the war. He himself did not know why. A psychologist later analyzed that it was because he was in a different state of mind when he made the clocks. This is the power of emotion.
According to the American educator Dewey, in education "to what extent the ends and means are separated, the meaning of the activity is reduced to what extent, and makes the activity a drudgery that a person will escape whenever it is possible to escape". This explains why the more parents ask their children to study hard, the less they are interested in studying.
It is easy for an adult to accuse a child of "not working hard", and along with this comes the criticism that the child "doesn't know what to do". It seems that children do not know the benefits of studying hard, so they are told over and over again that they should study hard.
This is really underestimating children. It's not that the child doesn't know that hard work can lead to good grades, he just can't do it. When learning activities do not evoke pleasant experiences, he is unable to mobilize his own initiative and involuntarily shows laziness, lack of hard work, lack of seriousness, etc. - many people think that this is the nature of some "untalented" children, but in fact it is his motivated nature is distorted.
Children who are "not hardworking" often seem to forget about studying, and spend their time watching TV, playing games, playing soccer, talking on the phone, or even sitting around doing seemingly insignificant things, acting like they are particularly "unmotivated". He is a very "unmotivated" person. Adults talk about him, he is thick-skinned and does not care. Parents should not look at this situation in isolation and simply put the blame on the child alone.
The truth is that every child is willing to do better in their studies, to satisfy their parents, and to be praised by adults. This is because it is also human nature to be motivated. If some children show no motivation for learning, it is not lacking in their nature, but slowly lost in their later growth.
Dewey believes that for children, play and learning are not in conflict, and that children are capable of coordinating the two under normal conditions. If a child only wants to play and does not want to learn, so that the two conflict, it must indicate that his educational environment has some kind of bad things influencing him. He notes that "where what is done borders on drudgery, or where externally imposed work tasks need to be accomplished, the demands of play are present." Therefore, it is because adults imply that learning is a "hard task" or destroy children's interest in learning in various incorrect ways, making learning a "hard task", that children want to avoid it, to play and waste time in an inordinate way, and to become The child becomes "unintelligent".
Parents and teachers should study the characteristics of children, sympathize with their psychology, and pay attention to the "learning emotion" aspect of the child's spirit of learning. Children are fragile and helpless, so don't treat them as heroes who can overcome difficulties and don't bother them with "hard work" over and over again. To wishfully ask a child to have the spirit of "lying down" is the same as asking a freshly shelled bird to soar in the blue sky; to subjectively ask a child to have the spirit of "hard work" without paying attention to the nurturing elements in the environment is like thinking that you can grab a bunch of money from the air. This is as unjustified as thinking you can grab a bunch of money from the air, and is a typical materialistic approach.
"Hard work" is a mature learning character that does not arise out of thin air, but grows on the soil of reason and interest. Some children are still unwilling to study hard when they are in middle school and about to take the entrance exam, which means that their learning character has always remained at a younger age, and this stagnation in development is due to the fact that from childhood to adulthood, they have never formed an interest in learning and have never developed rationality in their minds. These developmental stagnations must be related to the parental attitude and approach to education.
The main contradiction that children have to solve in each learning period is different. At this stage of China's education system, I believe that the elementary school stage mainly solves the problem of interest in learning, the middle school stage mainly solves the problem of learning methods, and the high school stage only spells diligence.
From interest, method to diligence, it is a cause-and-effect relationship, the former does not exist, the latter can not be well achieved. In each learning process, they also cannot be separated diametrically, but coexist in each stage; horizontally, the same order. Therefore, in every kind of learning activity, "interest" is always important, and only when interest is well taken care of can methods be generated, and only when interest and methods are available can diligence grow.
The rationality of learning is formed gradually, and only when the main contradictions of each period are solved can the learning character appear in a good state.
Of course, parents' ability is limited, we may not be able to make our children feel that learning is a "fun thing", but at least we should tell them with our eyes and actions that learning is a "not hard thing". We may not have the ability to make our child as enthusiastic about studying as he is about playing ball games or computer games, but we should at least make him feel that it is as normal and necessary as sleeping and eating. This requires us to think about how we manage our children, to pay attention to our own subtext when we talk to them, and to appreciate what message our words are sending to them.
When it comes to raising children to study diligently, it is important not to reinforce "suffering" but to try to dissipate it - not to suggest to the child that studying is hard, and not to put pressure on the child. The actual fact is that you will not be able to get a good deal on your own.
When Yuan Yuan started high school, she was so tired of studying that she would occasionally complain that she was too tired and showed slackness. Parents should not add to her suffering with positive lectures like "know how to suffer", but should find ways to diminish her experience of suffering and suggest to her that "studying is not hard".
I took two approaches to help her.
One is to find some information about the experience of the top students in the college entrance examination, especially those who talk about hard work, so that she knows that all the students who have achieved good results, none of them are not hardworking. This apparently reinforces the need to study hard, but actually eases her feelings about suffering. Since the top students worked so hard, it was normal for her to work hard herself. During this process, I took care not to mention a single word to her asking her to suffer and work hard.
Second, I read a book called "The Story of Science" with her, and I suggested she browse through it even though she was very busy studying in high school. This book is very well compiled, it presents the general development of various subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, and medicine, and tells the difficult journey with many vivid stories. The discovery of oxygen alone took so many years and so many hardships. Considering that she could easily hold a thin textbook and look at the amazing achievements of her predecessors, she felt lucky - she was just the recipient of these great achievements, so what was the pain.
I did all this so that Yuan Yuan could see things from a higher perspective and work hard without feeling bitter. A high school student has more mature reasoning, and her awareness can already arouse her perseverance, and perseverance can reduce the sense of suffering.
Yuan Yuan studied more than ten hours a day in her sophomore and junior years, very consciously and never wasted time for no reason. She slept an average of six hours a day, and had to drink coffee to refresh herself during her senior year. After the college entrance exam, I asked her if she felt it was too hard to study this way, and she said it was interesting to have such an opportunity to do something with full dedication and to understand so much knowledge thoroughly; she just felt that she should work hard, but she didn't feel bitter.
After the college entrance examination, many children seemed to be out of hell, and some of them wanted to tear up their books. Yuan Yuan wondered how she didn't feel this way, her life seemed to be almost the same as before, only that the content of her life was different. This may be because she has not been that particularly depressing, particularly bitter and tired feeling before the college entrance examination.
I found that parents are generally happy to accept "hard work" when they are told to let their children "work hard"; if they are told not to tell their children to "work hard", parents often do not like to hear it and even resent it.
Maybe it is because the idea of "hard study" has been deeply rooted in people's hearts and minds, and people have been thinking this way for years; while the saying "don't be hard" is so new that people often reject it by feeling it without understanding it by heart. Another reason is that talking about "hard study" is unilateral to change the child, which parents are willing to do; but not to talk about "hard" but to let the child achieve hard, which changes the first is the parents, parents will generally reject, because people do not like to be changed by others change.
A middle school teacher told me this story. A boy in her school did very well in the college entrance exams, and the boy's parents were invited to speak to parents of current students about how they raised their children. The parent summed up her experience: "Nothing else, just force him to work hard". She said that English books are also available in the bathroom at home, so that her child does not even waste time going to the bathroom. This parent's experience was well received by other parents, and as a result, many of them went home and forced their children to study, forcing a book on them even when they went to the bathroom.
Many parents do a very fine job of educating their children, and it is precisely those everyday details that make the child whole. However, when summarizing their experiences, many parents are not good at capturing the details and do not find the essence of their actions, and often only talk about superficial things according to the clichés. I believe this parent's statement that she "just pushed him to work" is true, but she was just stating a situation in isolation. I'm almost certain that she must have been doing something really smart above and beyond this tactic, otherwise her child's learning would not have been the same for more than a decade.
It's not that she doesn't want to tell everyone, it's probably because she won't summarize. This is the same as some successful parents talking about home education books sold in the market now, the parents' "success" is true, and the methods talked about in the book are not false, but the parents, due to professional or expression level limitations, did not refine and show the really effective, core methods, but more present some skinny, non-essential things. These things are not very informative to other parents, and may even be misrepresented. Parents who only learn the rudiments and come back to simply catch the "work", to catch the children to go to the toilet time, I am afraid that in the end will be a big disappointment.
There is another reason why people are especially willing to talk to children about suffering, because there are too many examples to support the causal relationship between "suffering" and "success".
We often read stories about how great scientists and artists, both ancient and modern, have worked and studied tirelessly, and these stories are often used as examples of "hard work" to inspire future generations. These stories are often used as examples of "hard work" to inspire future generations. They convince people that it is the truth that "only when you suffer, you become a man of the world".
In fact, every person who devotes himself to study and work must have developed an interest or sense of responsibility for his study and work that is so strong that it often transcends physical needs. What ordinary people see is their "suffering" in food and living, and they do not see their "joy" in what they love, so they think they are successful by virtue of their "suffering". In fact, they are not "bitter", they are just "obsessed", the pleasure of which others do not appreciate.
Just as some children show obsession with computer games, on the machine, they can also do not sleep, do not eat - this is called "hard work", is it more appropriate to call "hard work"? Both "hard work" and "hard work" imply physical and mental effort, but the feelings brought to the people involved are completely different.
Although we do not need to distinguish between "hard work" and "hard work" in our lives, we must be aware that different feelings can have completely different effects on our children in education.
If you want your child to do a good job, you must first make him like it, or at least not resent it, and avoid mixing in factors that make him feel unhappy - learning not to "work hard", that's the truth.
Special Tips
It is necessary to train children to be diligent in their studies, but using the words and ideas of "hard work" to require children to do so is often doing the opposite.
It is because adults imply that learning is a "hard task" or destroy children's interest in learning with various incorrect methods, making learning a "hard task" that children want to avoid, play and waste time in an inordinate way, and become The child wants to avoid learning, play and waste time, and becomes "unintelligent".
In elementary school, the main problem is interest in learning; in junior high school, the main problem is learning methods; and in high school, it is diligence.
When it comes to training children to study diligently, it is important not to reinforce the "bitterness" but to dissipate it as much as possible - do not suggest to your child that studying is bitter, and do not put pressure on your child. Avoid him to feel bitter in the learning activities.
Educational toys can be used to prompt children's learning abilities