Why You Should Be Teaching Your Students to Beg

Posted By Andy Aldrich on May 12, 2014 | 0 comments

My wife and I have made a concerted effort to decrease the amount of interactions our 2 year old daughter has with technology.  We haven’t so much decreased her screen time as just avoided it all together.*  However, if you’re a parent like I am, then you know that your  child has an uncanny ability to chip away at your resolve.  Between ear twisting whines to sweet smiles our daughter has learned the art of begging, leaving shame in her wake to finagle her way into getting what she wants.  Lately, as her reasoning ability has begun to develop it’s been interesting to hear her try and use logic to get what she wants: “I can’t take a nap today because it’s cloudy,” or “I’m sad, can I have ice cream because it’ll make me feel better.”  Of course, when despite all her effort we still say no, she resorts to dramatic flails of her hands in the air with an exacerbated “please!”

…no matter where you live, you likely work within a school that has numerous and surprising connections, but how often do you push your students to tap into these connections to bring their learning to the next level.

Truthfully, although I don’t want to give into my daughter’s iPad fix I’d like to see her sharpen her ability to beg, or said differently, sharpen her skills of persuasion.  I think we undervalue this skill in schools, and outside of schools we often relegate it to the used car salesman.  In doing so we miss an important skill-building opportunity with our students.  No not the art of car salesmanship, but the important skills of persuasion, argument, rhetoric, empathy, resilience, networking/community-building and many more.

In fact, this is an area I continue to try and build in myself.  If you’ve been around me lately, you know that I’m constantly talking about the possibilities of building a house in Honolulu.  To some it looks like I’m scheming, but what I’m doing is sharpening my ideas against others and looking for fellow collaborators who share my same dream of an affordable dwelling on this island.  So far in my journey I’ve spoken with landowners, fellow builders, contractors, city planners, architects…you name it.  And along the way I’ve learned more and more about what it would take to do this project.  You might ask what does have to do with begging?  Although, I’m not begging people for money (yet), I’m often begging people for their knowledge and time, which many people have generously given to help me understand the ins-and-outs of doing something like this.

We are often blessed by a variety of speakers who come and go through Punahou dispersing a little bit of their knowledge and experience along the way.  A few weeks back i had the chance to hear from Nicole Swedlow, founder of Entre Amigos, a non-profit community center in San Francisco, Nayarit, Mexico that provides numerous benefits to its community (take a minute to check out their work here).

What struck me about her story was how with little formal community center building skills she help persuade/convince/sell/beg the community to come together to build this fabulous place for people to learn and pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty.  For instance, when they finally secured a building for the center, instead of paying for contractors and artists to develop the site, they convinced skilled people in the community to donate their skills and expertise.  If you’re involved in a similar community center, church or other organization, then this model might seem familiar.  Yet, the critical part was Nicole and her partners willingness and skill to pull together and coordinate her communities talents.  Or in other words, beg for them to participate.

Getting back to schools, no matter where you live, you likely work within a school that has numerous and surprising connections, but how often do you push your students to tap into these connections to bring their learning to the next level?  I don’t just mean financial resources, although that’s important too, but instead leverage relationships and common goals between partners to accomplish student goals.  A few years back I asked a class of students to create movies/documentaries based on a social issue in the Philippines.  Not sure what they’d end up with, by the time they were done they had connected with the provincial governor,  local politicians, CEOs, and international NGOs to produce their movies.  I had little to do with their results excepts helping them brainstorm whom or what connection they could leverage.  Looking back I like to think that through those projects the students learned just a little bit about how to beg.

In what ways are you giving your students a chance to beg?

*Airplanes are another story, we have no restrictions on iPad use when traveling 12 hours in a metal tube a few miles above the ground.