▶ Your Answer :
Educating people involves diverse processes
and results as teaching, learning, and interactions keep going, especially in
forms of both positive and negative actions. Negative actions may bring up
negative influences on learners; this may be why the argument claim in that
way, however, I disagree with this statement because negative actions play a
significant role in learning.
To
begin with, one might say that negative actions or results in education will
negatively impact on learners, therefore, they insist that educators must praise
positive ones only. This may be true because negative actions can cause learner
to lose their motivation. However, positive actions can cheer them up and
encourage them to progress. For example, Michael Jordan, once was one of the
poorest shooters in the college basketball league. However, he and his coach
kept pointing out his good shoots and great plays. They did not focus on poor
play or malfunctioned shoot tries. As a result, by focusing on positive
actions, he gained high confidence and the rest is history. Likewise, praising
positive actions and ignoring negative ones can be necessary in education.
However,
despite noting the Jordan’s case, we must note that negative actions are
essential in learning at the same time. This is because learners can notice
what is right and what is wrong in their learning processes. For example,
Merril Swain, a professor emeritus in University of Toronto, majored in second
language acquisition, strongly claimed that “negative feedback” is important as
well as “positive feedback” in second language learning. If a student makes a
mistake by saying “I are a student,” then, teacher’s feedback such as “Pardon
me? I am a student?” will help the student to correct the mistake. Also, this
type of interactions involving recognition of negative actions plays a significant
role in learning the target language, Swain reported in her research. Therefore,
analyzing negative actions is also necessary in education.
Moreover,
negative actions or mistakes should be highlighted in learning process, because
it could be the starting point of better outcomes. For example, Steve Jobs,
before making the Macbook, tried to make a computer that can speak, named
Lisa. Unfortunately, this Lisa project has not accomplished successfully
because they faced a financial problem due to Steve spent too much money on the
project. However, this negative action, in the long term project of developing
better computer models, has been discussed and studied by many developers in
the company. Since the negative process of Lisa project was handled meaningfully,
better results were able to come out to the World e.g., MacBook, iPhone, and
iPad.
In
sum, common sense might say that negative actions should be prohibited because
it will demotivate learners, however, I disagree with this statement by
pointing out that negative actions are, actually, essential parts of learning. Through
evaluating and reflecting on the negative outcomes or actions, learning can
better meaningfully occur than ignoring them. |