I wouldn’t believe this story if something similar hadn’t happened to me at about the same age:
A New York librarian was fired from her job after standing up for a child who liked to read. Lita Casey, who worked as an aide at the Hudson Falls Free Library for 28 years, said she was “stunned” after a library board member called her with the bad news on Monday night. . .
Casey spoke up on behalf of Tyler Weaver, a 9-year-old who has won the library’s summer reading contest for five straight years. He’s won a T-shirt, an atlas, a water bottle and several certificates of achievement. This year, he read 63 books in just six weeks. But library director Marie Gandron, wanted to change the rules to end the child’s winning streak. Gandron reportedly said the boy “hogs” the contest and should “step aside.”
Instead of making it a competition, the director shared plans to pull the winner out of a hat.
At my school, I was the star in all English classes for obvious reasons. I’d been speaking English my entire life and had learned to read and write in English before I did in Russian and Ukrainian. As a result, my English was better than that of all of the teachers combined and multiplied by one hundred eleven. We had regular English competitions, and I won all of them very easily.
One of the teachers decided that it was unfair that I should win every year. She convinced the other judges that other kids were getting discouraged from learning because they knew they couldn’t surpass me. I was awarded the third prize, and the first two prizes were given to two other students. Kids are not stupid, so the “winners” knew that theirs were pity prizes. They did not look in the least encouraged by this kind of win. All everybody felt was intense discomfort. This was the last English competition we had because nobody felt like organizing them or participating any longer.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is the kind of political correctness that many (in particular on the political right-wing) complain about, the pervasive idea that “everyone is special.” Another example is the little kid sports games where everyone gets a trophy, there are no winners or losers, etc…don’t get me wrong, I understand that not every child (or person) for that matter likes having to compete, but I mean if you want to compete, then it should be just that, a competition. This ultra-“fairness”-based kind of thinking sets children up for a lot of disappointment when they get out into the real world later on.
BTW Clarissa I am curious, why is it that you learned English so early in life? Was there someone in your family that made sure you learned it?
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Yes, my father wanted to ensure that I always had a way to make a living with a solid, marketable skill so he taught me.
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competition used to be about promoting a spirit — a spirit of engagement and liveliness, no matter what the outcome. It’s sad when the outcome is the most important thing. It’s sadder still when there are preemptory measures to emotionally buffer people against the outcome.
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If English was a second mother tongue to you, I understand the idea of giving the prizes to the best learners, which you already weren’t. If students in Israel were studying Russian instead of French as the possible second language, should all prizes always have gone to new immigrants (who may not know a word in Hebrew yet)? You were above the competition, so to speak. So, I could’ve said “Clarissa has it on mother tongue level, lets find out who knows the best after her.”
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The real reason the librarian was fired is in the previous article, from August 15 (your article is from Sept 18):
Gandron further told the reporter she planned to change the rules of the contest so that instead of giving prizes to the children who read the most books, she would draw names out of a hat and declare winners that way. She said she can’t now because Katie has come forward to the newspaper.
…
Casey said she enjoys working with all the kids at the library and doesn’t want her job to be in jeopardy, but she feels Gandron’s plan to change the rules of the contest are “ridiculous.”
…
Casey said she called library board member Michael Herman to complain.
Publically criticizing your boss (library director) and going to press with that? Calling boss’ ideas “ridiculous” for all the world to read? Would your sister kept employing the worker, who did that to her?
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This is not a private business, though, but a public library. The boss’s pride is irrelevant.
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If only government organizations actually worked that way!
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I heard that even in universities politics exist, from your own blog!
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Wanted to share:
http://nearearthobject.net/nearearthobject/2013/9/19/our-big-crowded-moral-circle
In the Boston Review, Claude S. Fischer takes a quick trip into the history, not of callousness, but of sympathy; primarily, why are we getting nicer to each other?
Why, indeed?
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I never did like competitions; my family played a lot of games, and when I lost, my older brother taunted me for days afterwards, and would sometimes hit me for it (he was quite the bully, but oddly enough, he turned into a pretty good adult). I don’t even enjoy watching sports.
I do, however, like to be part of a group working toward a goal, whether that’s playing in a band, synchronized swimming, dancing, brainstorming, organizing a big party, doing a classroom project or even playing a pick up baseball game where no one’s really keeping score, because we’re doing it for the joy of playing the game.
My library had those book-reading things too, but it wasn’t really a competition; you got a prize if you read X amount of books, and the prizes got better as you read more (even then, they were very small prizes, like an ice cream cone from a local store or a ribbon). Everyone that got to that level got that prize and a certificate.
If that library director didn’t want it to be a competition anymore, there are better choices than pulling a name out of a hat. By doing the same sorts of things my old library did, the kids would still “win” but many kids could (not just one), and by having smaller prizes at different levels, many more kids would enter. The whole point is to get kids to read more books, right?
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I think I can understand the library wanting to have a variety of winners, since I assume the purpose of the competition is to encourage a lot of kids to read and not just to celebrate that one kid. A better solution would have been to limit the amount of times a kid can win the competition. That way, this kid could still boast that he had won the competition the maximum number of times, if the winners after him didn’t read as many books, he could also boast that no one had beaten his record.
Failing that, they could have different age categories or first, second and third prizes.
In my experience, most competitions have rules like that to prevent this kind of situation.
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This contest seems like a poorly thought out idea. How did the library verify how many books the kids read? Did they quiz the boy on all 63 books? And did the length of the books matter? Did reading Green Eggs and Ham count for as much as The Lord of the Rings? I’d rather have a kid who read a few books and savoured them and loved them than a kid who sped read through as many as possible just to get a prize.
Also, although the director’s idea was stupid, going public with the disapproval was the wrong method to take to deal with it. Among the consequences of going public was drawing attention to the child. I don’t know if he was named in the paper, but in this day and age it would be easy enough to find out.
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I once read a children’s book that brought up this exact issue. The main character was trying to read a bunch of short books to win a contest like this one, and she couldn’t understand another character who was reading a longer book because he liked it.
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Since when is participating in company politics by objecting to something you deem a horrible idea that will damage your workplace a reason to fire such an employee?
What kind of idiot is in charge of HR and why does they want their employees to be a bunch of brainless yay-sayers?!
Bullshit.
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There is nothing more insulting than a pity prize. I never felt discouraged when I didn’t win; I felt like a piece of shit when I had to get a prize for “making the greatest progress in English”.
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I got a “most improved” prize in High School choir once that actually did make me very happy. At the beginning of the semester everyone had been complaining that I was singing off-key, so I applied myself, started bringing a tape-recorder to class, taught myself to relax and hear what everyone else was singing, and gradually found myself getting compliments both from people in the choir and people who heard me sing in events unrelated to the school.
I understood that it wasn’t the greatest prize in the world, but I enjoyed getting a shiny trophy and I did feel that it was both accurate and directly related to my own efforts.
It all depends on the context.
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Amongst my close circle of friends at uni we had a saying:- “There are only two grades High Distinction and Fail, other names for Fail are Distinction, Credit and Pass.
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