How do you praise your students?

     The way we teach our students is one thing, but when it comes to praising our new generation

we shouldn’t tell them to how smart they are. After reading an article about “How Not to Talk to

Your Kids”, it made me begin to think where my life in elementary school and the progression of

school itself went. The major idea that circumference the whole topic was not to tell your child they

are “smart”, the reason being it lead to the child to pick easy questions or give up all together, so to

have the idea of being intelligent. When I was in middle school I was given an IQ test to see where I

stand among my peers in the Individualized Education Program (IEP), after the test I was told I had

an IQ of 121. Ever since then I can recall I never tried my hardest and seek the easier questions to

answers to have that ability to say I am smart. When I was in elementary school I was diagnosed

with a learning disability for writing and reading, at that young age I always had this stigma that I’m

a horrible writer or I read too slowly. I’ve had plenty of extra help along my school years, but the

most detrimental period was my freshmen English class. The teacher had told me that because of

my learning disability I can never get my ideas onto paper. It wasn’t until my junior year that I had

met Mrs. Schmidt, she began to work with me on the progress of writing an essay. She found that I

was able to learn visually, and taught me the structure of an essay, each key components that went

along with it. After which I started to write poems, she had taught me that with poems you write

the most direct way possible to get your idea across with each line. She always praised me in a way

to improve, to write more descriptive, motivated me to have a greater result within my writing.

More than ten years has passed, as I begin my journey through college and with it every day I can

recall the help Mrs. Schmidt had put into helping me.