The following essay is my response to one of the GRE issue exam topic named as "The best way to teach is to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones."
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Teaching is the intrinsic part of every education sector which serves as a basis for overall development of the students both personally and academically. The author of the prompt claims that teaching can be best achieved by praising positive actions and ignoring negative actions. While each side has its own advantages and downsides, I strongly disagree with the above claim. The following paragraphs will support my position in discord with the author’s claim.
From the early childhood, teaching paves a way for student to make better career and lead a halcyon and purposeful life. However, if teaching is done by only eulogizing positive actions and ignoring negative one, then it may be deleterious. Consider if a student is praised only for the positive aspects and the teacher is indisposed to pay heed to the negative aspects of another student, that student will find it difficult as why their work is left ignored. In such case, it may dispirit and demotivate him to try to work any harder. On one hand, the student who is shunned tends to repeat such mistake again because of failure to distinguish why it is right or wrong. On the other hand, this will consequently affect their performance badly.
Besides, there is disadvantage of applauding positive actions too. When students are applauded for their positive results, then they are likely to feel complacent or nonchalant. They are most likely to stay in their comfort zone and this will prevent student from trying or work even harder. Likewise, these students might think that their work is perfect after being praised and will overlook more room for improvement. This will in turn affect his ability to motivate himself to do better than previous. Also, praising positive and ignoring actions develop a feeling of detest in the students towards that teacher for being biased towards the student who is praised.
While the opponents may argue that the better teaching environment can be achieved if all negative actions are ignored and teacher focuses on only positive actions. However, what if students whose negative actions like harassing, tormenting and bullying other students are ignored? What if that student is drug addict and is luring other good students to fall into the trap of drug addiction. In such case, if these negative actions are ignored, then there will be no healthy environment for teaching and learning. Ignoring these actions will foster the teaching situation further. Nevertheless, if these negative actions, which are snubbed, are monitored, then the addicted students may be apprised of the harmful effects of his or her bad activities and get motivated by his teacher to work towards his better personality development.
In conclusion, the best way to teach is to explain people the ramifications of their negative actions so that it will inspire or encourage those people to bear fruitful results and at the same time helps to create positive environment or atmosphere for themselves and for their development. Ignoring negative aspects can be a demotivating factor for such people. At the same time, exalting excessively can develop overconfidence in people. Hence, I strongly disagree with the author’s claim.
