Making the Good Stuff Stick

This past week, my students took their first "real" test.  I passed back the tests with shiny praise stickers on all the 'A' papers.  (I firmly believe that you never outgrow the satisfaction of getting a paper back with such a simple motivator.  And if a sticker motivates a student, I'll buy out all the stickers in Abilene.)  

What the students did with the stickers really surprised me.  I had been thinking about how "refrigerator-worthy" these freshly donned papers looked, but when the kids got them, they had different intentions.  Most of the students peeled the sticker off of their paper and stuck it on them.  Prior to this moment, I would have thought that me asking a high school student to wear around a corny sticker at school would be considered cruel and unusual!  But these students stuck the colorful "bravo-s", "well done-s" and "superb-s" to their shirts or school IDs.

This caused me to think.  These kids didn't want that affirmation to be stuck on a paper that would quickly be shoved in their notebook and forgotten.  They wanted others to know about their excellent performance.  More than that, they wanted a personal reminder that their hard work was appreciated.  

All too often, we are quick to let our metaphorical "sticker" fall off.  We feel pride in a job well done and relish seeing cheery affirmation, but that feeling is quick to fall by the wayside when we are criticized, under-appreciated, and forgotten.  Self-worth is difficult to hold on to, but if you don't believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?  I found this quote and thought that it communicated nicely what I am trying to say:

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Joan Didion

For those of you reading, know that I think that you are super, wonderful, and are doing a great job.  Moreover, know that we serve a God who constantly believes these great things about us.  There is nothing that we can do that will ever change His love.  

I hope that some of this "sticks".  

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

1 Peter 2:9