A Few Previous Experiences

My personal experience with competition in the classroom has been very different from one teacher to the next. In the context of writing classes, I can remember two specific incidents of classroom competition. One of these experiences was great for me and the other was potentially dangerous. The first that I can remember was in a high school class. It was my senior year of high school and I was less than thrilled to be involved in the class or the assigned project. I was ready to graduate and move on. My class was reading The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. While I had enjoyed the book, I was not excited about the class in general or any work that I might have to do for the class. My teacher, Mrs. Genoble, in an effort to cure the students of the class of their senioritis, assigned us a task: to build something representative of the book. She gave us very few guidelines for the project. She just wanted us to build something. She let us pick our own groups and we set to work attempting to discern exactly what she wanted us to do. She said that at the end of the time allotted, three days, we would look at all the projects and the best one would receive a prize. She never specified what the prize was, but we all knew we wanted it.
Over the next three days, several groups began building models of the island, complete with working volcanoes, model airplanes, and tropical plants. These were some of the most creative projects I had seen in my entire high school career, even with science fairs, etc. Looking back, I am rather amazed at the level of work she got from students in a writing class. Although the project was not a writing project, it did help us to think about the book critically and decide what the important elements of the book were. I suppose you could call it an exercise in visual rhetoric. My group, wanting to do something different, decided that everyone else would probably build some sort of model of the island. We didn't want to do the same thing everyone else was doing, so we decided to build a scene. We would create the atmosphere of the book (as we read it) and portray one of the climactic scenes of the book for our class. We set out to find a pig's head. After all, this would be the most important and realistic element of our scene. We got one from our local abattoir, put it on a stick, and set it up in the woods near our school. We draped a parachute over the tree next to it and spread some red jello around it. The next day, when it came time for us to present our project to the class, one member of our group, dressed as a savage boy, lead the class into the woods and into our scene. After we acted out the scene, we showed the class the video we made when we went to the abattoir. The video was mostly for fun, but we thought it was a nice touch as one of the men in the abattoir had shouted from behind the pig's head, "I am the Lord of the Flies!" Appropriate.
At the end of the three days, after everyone had presented their projects, we all eagerly awaited the revelation of who had won the contest. Mrs. Genoble stood at the front of the class and said, "Well, everyone, these were some of the best projects I have ever seen in this class. Well done." And then she dismissed us from class, or attempted to. We were none too happy with the fact that she never announced a winner. We wanted to know whose project was best. When we asked what happened, she said, "You all win because now you understand the book." We were disappointed to say the least. However, her competitive exercise demonstrates all four of Schindler's criteria for healthy competition. It was for fun. The reward was never real. It created no long-term effect, other than the fact that several of us consider The Lord of the Flies to be one of our favorite books now. And everyone in the class believed they had a great shot at winning because of the positive feedback she gave us all along the way. The exercise was a success.
In college, I took a literature class in which most of the students in the class were fairly competitive people anyway. While that class still recalls fond memories for me because it helped me come to love the writing of one of my current favorite authors, I don't know if others would feel so fondly about it. I am not even entirely sure if some students recognized that our teacher was fostering our competitive natures. When this teacher passed back our writing assignments, she passed them back in order of highest grades to lowest grades. I am almost positive that this was her practice. I cannot be entirely sure, but several of us compared grades on a regular basis anyway and from what I observed in class, papers were almost always passed back in order of highest grade to lowest. As I say, I am not sure if anyone else ever noticed that it was happening, but for me, it seemed rather wrong. I always wanted to be the first to get a paper back and when I wasn't, it was hurtful and I felt like the teacher was looking at me smugly because I hadn't done as well as someone else. While I personally was still inspired to write better and receive my paper first after the next assignment, I am not so sure that this would have been the case for everyone in the class. I can see the possibility that some of the students would have been discouraged and think that they could never be good enough for this teacher. Many of the students who didn't notice what she was doing already felt that way. She was a difficult teacher and she did a lot of good for my writing personally, but I can easily believe that she would not have had such a positive influence on everyone in the class.
I believe that the ways in which she encouraged our competitive natures were not the healthy kind of competition that needs to be implemented in the classroom. The competition in her classroom fit Schindler's criteria for unhealthy competition:

• It feels real. The winners and losers will be affected.
• The reward is “valuable/real.”
• Winners are able to use their victory as social or educational capital at a later time.
• Competition implicitly or explicitly rewards the advantaged students.
• Over time students develop an increasingly “competitive mindset.”

I think that as more of us realized what was happening, we did become more competitive people. The class damaged a few of our relationships and it took a while for us to regain the kind of comaraderie we had going into the class. While it seems as though I am stating the ways in which classroom competition has had a negative effect on me, I am still advocating its use when it is implemented in such a way that the students cannot see its effects as it happens. In Mrs. Genoble's class, we all knew we were competing, but we did not realize what we were really gaining from the exercise until it was over. In my college literature class, we all knew we were competing and we could physically see, every time a paper was passed back, the result or payoff of our work. The difference is that in Mrs. Genoble's class, we never knew the outcome. It was all a fun game. In my college literature class, we became like the boys of The Lord of the Flies, wanting to out everyone else and secure the power of that first paper passed back for ourselves. As John-Paul Sardi notes, "Competition is a healthy, friendly, normal human endeavor. Measuring ourselves against others is important to our growth as a means of orienting ourselves. The enemy is not competition as much as it is the desire to kill and overmaster. It is an error to misidentify competition as this desire." If we are to continue to grow and change as writers, we should be driven by a force. Many of our students do not have the internal motivation to want to change themselves, so competition can be a healthy way to spur them on to become better writers if we use it correctly.

While competition can be a dangerous thing, we must recognize its benefits. We must accept that it can, and often does, produce excellent results. When implemented correctly, it can prod our students in the right direction, helping them to desire better work for themselves. Ultimately, of course, their biggest competition should be themselves. I think Schindler would agree with that. When students compete with themselves, attempting to receive a better grade or produce a better piece of writing than the last, everyone wins.