by Linda Shrigley

Created on: March 18, 2008   Last Updated: July 30, 2008

Is Competition in School Helpful or Harmful to the Students?

Good healthy competition is the best way our children have of improving their education. Without competition, our children would never strive to do their very best at whatever they want to do with their lives.

What do you think sports activities would be like, if no one did any better than the next, they would be very boring wouldn't they? Would you go out and spend good money on tickets to watch a hockey game, or baseball, basketball, football, or any other type of sports of there was no competition? "NO" you would not, and neither would I. When I go to a game, I want my team to stomp the other team into the ground, so my team can win the game. I do not want to see "here it is your turn to score," I want to see them win the game. If they do lose the game, I will know that they had at least tried their best.

How well would our children learn to spell if we did not encourage them to do their best? Spelling bees are a great way for our children to learn how to spell. They will try their best to beat their classmates to the right answer. Showing them place cards with a word on it is another good way to teach them to spell. I used to put a word on a piece of paper, tell my children what the word is I am holding up and get them to spell it. If they got it right they would get the piece of paper, if they got it wrong, I would keep the piece of paper. We set a limit of fifteen minutes and if they got 12 words right in that fifteen minutes they would get a prize. I would always keep a supply of just little things that they would get when the won. It didn't take long before they were getting a prize every night. At that point, I would go on to more difficult words.

I did the same thing with math when they started to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. They were not the same age because there was 4 1/2 years difference in their ages, so I used to work with them for an hour each per night. They both done great and would look forward to the competitions each night. I would work with each child for 45 minutes each night, fifteen minutes for spelling and fifteen minutes for math, with a fifteen minute in between.

This method did really well on their grades and soon I had some of their friends doing this with their parents. Every once in a while we would get the two children and us two moms together and hold little competitions between the two children. Teaching them to compete with their friends in the same grade helps

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