Issue Essay feedback

[m21]

Hello!

I am taking the GRE in a month and I have taken a couple of practice tests now. I would really appreciate it if I can get feedback on this Issue Task essay I wrote for one of them. I'm not sure how this works in the forum but I'm happy to correct someone else's issue task to return the favor. Let me know if you want for me to correct yours as an exchange for some feedback on mine.

- Michelle

The best way to teach is to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.

Teaching is a hard feat: as a teacher, you have to encourage positive behaviors and discourage negative behaviors, all while keeping your students motivated. Therefore, disregarding negative behaviors when teaching and just praising positive behaviors does not foster learning. Just praising positive behaviors should be avoided. Negative actions should be analyzed and talked though to make sure the student learns from their mistakes. 

A good example that shows the importance of correcting negative behaviors is studying for the GRE. My goal while studying was to learn all the topics the GRE was going to test me in and answer as many questions correctly. While doing practice questions, I kept track of the questions I had answered correctly and questions I had answered incorrectly. If I had just rewarded myself for the times I got questions right and ignored those which I answered incorrectly, I would have not made much progress. If I had not corrected the questions I got wrong, I would have kept on making the same mistakes when answering future questions that test me on similar topics and kept on getting the questions wrong. Therefore, it was essential for me to go back to the negative questions I answered ad see what flaws I had in my thought process for answering to get the questions right the next time. 

Take for example a child who is being taught good habits at home. The child is taught to put their dishes in the sink every time they are done eating. Every time the child remembers to put the dirty plates in the sink, the parents praise the child and the child learns to put the dishes in the sink after eating. Moreover, the parents want the child not to interrupt people when other people are not talking. Although the parents want to teach the child this, the parents ignore the faults of the child every time the child interrupts someone. This will probably make the child keep on interrupting people when the other person speaks because they are not being told not to do it. If the child was told by their parents to not interrupt someone when they are talking, the child would learn from their mistakes and get better at not interrupting people.

This does not mean that praising good actions is detrimental to learning. Praising good actions reinforce on the person to keep on behaving the same way and therefore learn. If I had not rewarded myself when I got a section right in the GRE, I would have been burned out when studying. Rewarding myself every time I got a question right helped me be motivated in learning. If the parents of the child had not praised the child every time they put the dirty dishes on the sink, the child would have no motivation to learn this behavior. Rewarding positive actions is not enough to foster thorough learning and would not help people learn from their mistakes. 

Correcting negative behaviors when learning something is necessary to foster thorough learning. If only positive behaviors were praised, negative ones would keep on happening, and people would just keep on doing the positively reinforced ones and not the negative ones.Therefore, the best way to teach is to reinforce positive behaviors and correct negative behaviors. 

[speechykourt]

Your writing itself looks really good (grammar, conventions, word use, etc).  One of the biggest things I saw when studying for the GRE was to make sure that your points are 100% related to the topic.  You may come up with some awesome points, but it may only partially relate to the issue.  I think that is kinda what happened with your GRE example.  It related because you're talking about correcting negative, however the question asks about negative actions and I don't think answering a question wrong would quite count as a negative action, more of just a mistake.  I think a better example was of the child putting away the dishes and interrupting.  So I'd just make sure you have a thesis and two solid points that are clearly related!

[m21]

Speechykourt, thank you so much for your feedback! I will keep in mind making more relevant examples for the next essays