I'm out of sticks and carrots.

[MrDibble]

@QuickSilver

If that does not fit in with your definition of a carrot, I’d love to hear what does.

Was it in the list of things I raised as possibly not seen as carrots by your son? No, it was not. So besides my point.

And while in this case it is a promise of a reward and not the actual realization of one, there have been other carrots promissed and given without strings attached.[…]So it would be wrong for anyone to try to claim that my use of carrots is in some way capricious or always within sight but out of reach, hence the ambivalence to rewards promissed.

I didn’t claim that at all. I merely noted that not everything you seem to think of as a carrot is in fact such. Sometimes it’s just absence of stick, which would not be perceived the same as a carrot necessarily.

[zweisamkeit]

@QuickSilver

I offered him the availability of a car that he would have pretty much at his disposal provided he was maintaining B’s (honestly, I’d take C’s at this point).

If that does not fit in with your definition of a carrot, I’d love to hear what does.

I can’t believe you still don’t understand this after hundreds of posts: your carrots are not necessarily your son’s.

YOU see free availability of a car as a carrot. Clearly, HE does not. Therefore, it’s not a carrot in this situation.

My mom fucking loves Good ‘n’ Plentys*. I find them vomit-inducing (she’s aware of this). If she had wanted me to clean my room** and dangled the “carrot” of buying me a big box/bag of Good ‘n’ Plentys… how successful do you think that would have been?

• interesting conundrum when it comes to pluralizing that name. Grammatically, it feels like it should be “plenties”, but it’s a proper name. But “plentys” looks so wrong.

** TOTALLY theoretically, of course. My room was always immaculate. :: coughcough :: :embarrassed:

[QuickSilver]

@zweisamkeit

I can’t believe you still don’t understand this after hundreds of posts: your carrots are not necessarily your son’s.

YOU see free availability of a car as a carrot. Clearly, HE does not. Therefore, it’s not a carrot in this situation.

And I can’t believe I’m still having to explain that I know my son a little better than you or Mr. Dibble and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a license and car is something he wants very very much. I know this, you see, because I know my son.

The point I’ve been trying to make is that there are no carrorts in existence that are tempting enough to make him do his work and hand it in on time. At the end of the day, that’s really the issue.

As an aside, the vice principal who tried to convince me that my son was ‘succeeding with a D’ has just been named school principal. :smack: …and so it goes…

[purplehorseshoe]

@QuickSilver

And I can’t believe I’m still having to explain that I know my son a little better than you or Mr. Dibble and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a license and car is something he wants very very much. I know this, you see, because I know my son.

The point I’ve been trying to make is that there are no carrorts in existence that are tempting enough to make him do his work and hand it in on time. At the end of the day, that’s really the issue.

As an aside, the vice principal who tried to convince me that my son was ‘succeeding with a D’ has just been named school principal. :smack: …and so it goes…

Well, whoever named the principal to the current role (the school board?) holds the ultimate keys to how good a school’s education is, so since your son is a product of that education system, it’s possible that you’re addressing a symptom (your son’s performance) of a different problem (the quality of education your school district provides) but that’s beyond the scope of this thread, I suppose.