Classroom carrots

Old people like me may be familiar with motivational analogies related to carrots and sticks. Young people, I have determined by noting the bewildered faces of my students when I make reference to these analogies, are not familiar with what carrots and sticks have to do with motivation. If you are also young, here is a brief explanation. Like horses or mules or other animals that people in ancient times (like the 1900s or Amish farms) might have used for various tasks, students can be motivated by making them move away from something that they want to avoid (hitting mules with sticks, reducing student grades for lack of attendance) or they can be motivated by making them move toward something that they want (putting a carrot in front of a mule or offering students bonus points for class participation).

As discussed by Patricia Hernandez on Kotaku, a new app called “Pocket Points” offers students carrots for avoiding the use of their phones in class. Hernandez writes that the app tracks how long students keep their phones locked during class and is in use at Cal State Chico and Penn State, though only 1,000 students have downloaded the app, so its use can’t be very pervasive at either campus. Of course, Hernandez notes that people may try to game the system and commenters have several suggestions for doing so.

Carrots may work, but they probably don’t leave the lasting impression of a stick, even if the stick is staged. That way students will know that you’re not a part of their system, man.

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“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links via your news feed. That’s a tasty carrot.

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Penn State and the norms of sexual assault

Tenured Radical has a great post about the ways that colleges and universities typically respond to accusations of sexual assault and how those typical responses failed Penn State in the case of Jerry Sandusky.  Largely absent in the media’s coverage of the case is the idea that we need to respond to all reports of sexual assault differently, not just those that involve children.  She states, in part:

Given what we know about all the adults who failed to act at Penn State, and the coarse indifference of a large number of Penn State students to their university throwing children under the bus in exchange for a major Bowl bid, we can speculate that sexual assault of all kinds is way down the list of administrative priorities at many universities. This isn’t just Penn State.  At Yale, women decided that DKE pledges chanting “No means yes, Yes means anal” was the last straw and filed a Title IX discrimination suit.  Only then did Yale close a fraternity that has been notorious on campus for decades. At my very own Zenith, charges of rape filed after an assault at a Beta fraternity last year have been followed up by that fraternity — and Zenith’s DKE chapter — inviting a speaker to campus to raise the topic of why fraternities — not women — are under assault.  And many of us on the faculty were shocked, following the accusations of rape at Beta last fall, as we followed a comments on a campus wiki where numerous students, male and female, assert their entirely unfounded opinions that the accuser was a liar and had filed a police report out of spite; and that the men who ran the frat were “good guys” so clearly no rape could have occurred.

Every time one of these things happens, what it exposes is the way social power is expressed through sexual power, and it requires a feminist response. Let’s move this from the sports page to our classrooms and start connecting the dots.

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