Beauty School Awards: More Harm Than Help

An Unfair Competition

 As a teacher, I was a teacher in a beauty school, and the students were adult students from all walks of life who wanted to make a change in their lives by studying beauty and starting a new career as a beauty professional, like esthetician, hair stylist, nail, and other beauty-related professionals. The teachers were instructed and mandated by the school to pick one student as the student of the month and, among other classes, choose one student as the student of the month in the school. I noticed something weird: the race for being the student of the month was among very few students, and that race to be at the top of the school was among a couple, and in most cases, just a couple who won it.

Each month, at the school assembly, the school had a kind of party and celebrated the winners of each area: top seller, school culture, student of the month, and a couple of other things like that. On one occasion, one specific student won seven months in a row as the student of the month.

It may seem a cool idea to choose the best student and publicly, I mean in the whole school assembly in front of all the other students, give them rewards. The problem was that the majority of the students were out of this game for whatever reason; either they didn’t have the background of those winners, they were busy with life, or simply they were not smart enough to compete. The worst was 100% attendance, which was not really fair. There were students with families, several kids, long working hours, single moms with tons of issues and trouble, and their kids became sick. The simple fact that they could make and come to the school and dare enough to make such a big movement in their lives was extraordinary, and they had to compete with some youngest who didn’t have anything else in the whole world to do except coming to school and socialize with others.

Giving a reward by itself was not the biggest issue; the issue was we were praising and awarding very few, and at the same time giving a message to the rest of the school that they are not competent or not hardworking enough, or a negative feedback and message that they are not good enough. In the first couple of weeks of starting class, I could easily say which students do better in what areas of education.

A school is not a racing game, and we should not put people who didn’t sign up for a race, just like when the parents discriminate among their kids and the bad and lasting effects that it leaves on the lives of every single one of the siblings. It is not fair and productive that each month, we remind more than 99% of the students that they are not competent in favor of a couple who, despite the awards and whatever, will be the best. The joy and feeling of happiness among those who were winning the rewards were very short for them, too, as they knew that they were the same as others and they had higher IQs or had previous experiences or very different backgrounds that set them apart.

A Responsible Approach

I believe there should not be any reward for the best in a class or school, specifically when they didn’t sign up for a race. In a bell-shaped distribution diagram, about 90% of students are in the middle range and very few down to the left of the curve, and they lag, which is normal, and very few on the right side of the curve, which is also normal. Comparing all students with a very few who will be the best anyway is diminishing and depressing the whole majority of the school with no positive outcome but negative. Those very few who won the rewards were not comfortable anyway; the middle majority rejected them because they were publicly hurt because of them.

A teacher and a school are responsible for all students and must provide education suitable for all students and avoid comparing and competing with students for the race that they didn’t sign up for.