Gift Exchange

I found the three article to be really interesting and many concepts in them actually shined some light on many of the experiences I have had in the past.  In particular, I found the first article about sharing the marbles to be intriguing when it talked about "everyone bearing the burden" when a mistake is made.  This is statement feels very relateable to me because when I played soccer and lacrosse in middle school through high school, this concept of "everyone bearing the burden" when is mistake is made was a big emphasis that the coaches tried to convey to us.

An example of "everyone bearing the burden" is that in soccer or lacrosse we had specific strategic plays that we would sometimes run during games.  And when someone messed up really badly or made in a mistake in other situations, the coaches would get angry and would always yell the same thing which was "everyone get on the sideline".  These five words were something every player dreaded as it always entailed in an excessive amount of running sideline to sideline as punishment for a mistake that you may have not even personally made.  Reflecting on the numerous times I've experienced this type of punishment, I can say that it did bring the team together more as we were suffering together.  But there was a minor drawback to this strategy as it kind of made the whole team dislike the individual who actually committed the mistake for a short period of time because you would have to run a lot, however those feelings didn't really last that long for me at least. 

I believe that this strategy of "everyone bearing the burden" made all the players to give there best even though they may want to be lazy during practices because of the fear of making everyone run as punishment.  And if everyone tried during practices, then it would benefit the team as a whole and the whole team would be rewarded whether that be by not running or winning games.  This concept is somewhat similar to how the first article talked about how all parties see that everyone is part of the success of the team by "pulling one rope together" and everyone tries to share the rewards equally.  However obviously this isn't a perfect example of sharing rewards equally among members as there are other forms competition in sports teams which make players not want to share rewards equally such as every players wants to be a starting player rather than being a backup player. 

Additionally, an example that is relatable to the third article about altruism about how adding a financial motivation somewhat ruins moral motivations are college courses that are graded on a curve.  These courses inhibit collaboration among students because it basically pins the students against the the rest of the other students with the financial motivation being their grade.  If a student decides to help other students, the other students may receive better grades which would lessen the probability of the curve being in that particular helpful students favor.  I believe that most people would say that collaboration of ideas among students is the ideal situation, yet there hasn't really been a fix to this problem or at least I don't really have any ideas for a solution to this issue.  The only "solutions" I have ever experienced previously are in courses which don't grade on a curve and you just get the grade that you get.  However how do you really assess whether a students understands the material and assess what grade the student really deserves if you aren't comparing their grade to other students in the class.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 2, 2019 at 4:52 AM

    Your story about soccer practice would have benefitted from talking about the frequency of mistakes and who made them. Were the mistakes randomly distributed among the team members? Or were certain members more prone to make the mistakes and other members hardly ever (and possibly never) made mistakes? The behavior and the reaction might be different depending on which situation offered a better description of the reality. Also, I wonder, if avoiding making mistakes was something a player could learn. If so, how would that learning occur? The way you told the story, the coaches used the punishment as perhaps incentive for the player or the player's teammates to do the learning on their own. But might the coaches be better able to educate the player on reducing the number of mistakes? In other words, lack of effort is one thing and you can incentivize that. But poor technique combined with significant effort is a different thing and needs a different remedy.

    Regarding your last paragraph, I encourage you to unpack the phrase, "the grade the student really deserves." Also, I would dispute your claim that peer comparison is the right way to assess this. If the subject matter is itself pretty standard, absolute performance on the tests might be a better measure than relative performance, because the test itself is designed to assess competence in the subject. Relative performance is better when there are hard tests and easy tests, and in advance the instructor is sure which is the case for that particular exam.

    Then, a personal anecdote that might get you to reconsider these issues from a different perspective. My first year at Illinois I taught intermediate micro and gave what I thought in advance where good exams to test student understanding but which the students found were too hard. I got course evaluations that said - worst instructor on campus - from some of the students. The next year when I taught the course, I toned down the difficulty some on the exams. This sort of compromise was emotionally difficult for me to do, but survival in the job is an imperative, so you make adjustments. Perhaps 10 years later I began to realize that I had implicitly viewed undergraduate economics as preparation for grad school, while very few students were actually going to follow that path. So the course needed not just to be toned down even more, but to be reoriented so it was more relevant to the majority of students.

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    Replies
    1. WesleyAuNovember 2, 2019 at 3:14 PM

      The frequency of mistakes varied a lot depending on which type of practice it was, if the practice was closer to a game day then there would usually be more mistakes or another possibility is that there was the same amount of mistakes during each practice, however the coaches were more aware or more strict on any mistakes that were made so we would run more. So overall, we would almost always have to run during a practice like it was somewhat inevitable, however the closer the practice was to a game day, they more we would usually have to run as punishment.

      Personally, I remember getting caught for mistakes only a couple of times during my years of playing both sports. However there were other players that were definitely more prone to making mistakes or the coaches just paid more attention to them so they would get caught for mistakes more. As for the second part of the first paragraph, the coaches expected us especially the starters to study the plays ourselves as we had the resources to do so with film and online play books. Also the coaches always encouraged the players to ask questions if they didn't exactly know what they were doing and those questions would never be penalized. And when we did have those rare practices in which we didn't make any mistake or very few mistakes, we were always rewarded whether it be with a short practice or no conditioning after practices (even though we may have did a lot of running as punishment, this didn't mean we wouldn't normally run after the practices for "conditioning"). So if you made a mistake, you really shouldn't have.

      As for you second paragraph, as I said, I'm not really knowledgeable on subject and I'm not sure if peer comparison is the correct way to assess this, but I personally couldn't think of another way. However I after reading your response I do see that if a subject is pretty standard, then absolute performance on the tests might be a better measure than relative performance in some situations while relative performance may be better in other situations.

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