Gilbert Authors Network

Poetry is at times the best bridge between reason and understanding. Here is a piece about teaching which I found worth the three mintues to watch. Teacher-poet Taylor Mali is asked, at a dinner party, “You’re a teacher, Taylor. Be honest: what do you make?”

Here is his answer: What Teachers Make

Because deep teaching must transcend or encompass powerful symbols such as money, excellence in teaching requires we understand how such compensation affects our work.

Money is a strong motive force. If your students pay you to teach, money necessarily becomes part of what you teach them, whether you intend it to or not. By the very act of accepting payment you show and thus teach that your teaching may be bought. When students believe their ability to pay is why you teach them, it affects how and what they learn.

Being paid to teach also affect us as teachers. We may wonder at our value when it is represented by money. We may be affected by the control of those who pay us.

If the money takes steps around you, as it does for most public school teachers, traveling from citizen to government and then back to the school and to the teacher, the influence that your monetary compensation has on your students is blunted because they are less aware of the flow of these funds. If parents instead gave their children cash to give you directly, what those students learn and how they understand your teaching would change markedly, as would your own understanding.

For the student who pays you directly, it is important to take into account that influence while at the same time separating the teaching from that influence – not an easy task. Additionally, it is important to separate out the teacher’s need for compensation from the student’s need to compensate. We may not need the money, but the student may need to pay in order to learn. Or the other way around.

Further, what money means to one student is different from what it means to the next. A rich student and a poor student will not have the same experience in learning in the same environment, even while paying the same amount. While each teacher-student relationship is unique, students in a classroom expect to be treated similarly. A difference in base wealth creates a difference in the learning experience even though on the surface it may appear equitable.

Thus we must look for and understand the currencies in play. Money and its absence are both motive forces. A student who believes they pay a lot to be taught may feel they need not give much else, such as respect or effort. A student who pays no money may feel they are incurring an obligation and attempt to compensate in other ways. Such reactions may interfere with the teaching, or they may help it, and we must seek to understand the student and their motivations so that we can best serve their learning.

If you have paying students, you have two issues to consider: for yourself, how money affects your teaching and how to allow for that influence. For the student, how to separate out the money from the learning, or how to include it in your teaching, or both.

My offered practice: If you are paid to teach, consider how your teaching would change – or stop altogether – if there were no money at all. Or less money. Or more. Consider how your teaching would change if students paid you directly, or in differing amounts. Follow the trail of influence that money plays in your teaching. Consider how your deepest and most important teachings are affected.

We all carry voices in our heads. They are the voices of our teachers, parents, friends. They comment on our work, our accomplishments, our failures. Sometimes they cause us to wonder if we have missed something, to wonder if they would approve.

Over time, these voices – these imagined voices – become so familiar that we are no longer entirely conscious of them even while we act and react with them in mind. In this cacophony of judgment and praise our own capacity to see clearly and think for ourselves can be drowned out.

Our students have such voices as well, and over time our own voice may join them. We must be on the lookout for this because as flattering as it is to have a student follow our mental footsteps and wonder how we would view their actions, it is our task to teach our students to see the world around them and think for themselves.

There are many ways to address such thought patterns in a student, some of them overt, such as discussing how we model the people who influence us, and some subtle, such as exaggerating a voice for dramatic effect and seeing if the student recognizes the echo in their own mind.

Most teaching is about strengthening the student’s understanding of our views, but there are times when it is best to seek to weaken the shadow of our voice in the student’s mind. This is not because our words are not worth hearing and remembering, but because we have a duty to teach our students to listen beyond imagined voices of opinion and judgment, to see past the pitfalls and blindnesses of their friends, parents, and teachers.

My offered practice: look for a time and place in which you sense a reflection of someone else’s voice in your student’s thoughts, perhaps even your own. Can you highlight these imagined judgments or praises in a way that helps the student see through them?

Kermit’s a liar. You can’t trust a frog (and any princess worth her salt could tell you that). It’s easy being green, at least a pale sort of green.

Lying frogs aside, I can finally answer the pesky perennial question, that question that’s troubled techie types for the last decade or two. That question: Should you turn your PC off at night or over the weekend?

If you’ve been in with the IT crowd, the answer to this question has always been a hearty “Nope!” (No kisses, no frogs, no princesses.) Leave them on. (Go away.)

Enterprise-wise, you see, we need those beasts on and working; even at home, you’re screwed if you don’t let them have their way. It’s the updates you see. Miss an update and the zombies come calling.

If you turn your PC off… well, then all those nice automated things don’t get done — important things, like updates, and bug patches, and virus signatures, and disk defragging, and other gobbledygook sort of technical things. They’re necessary, unfortunately. They’re important.

When confronted, I typically explain the simple trade-offs: It’s a choice between “leave them on” or you’ll be responsible for immanentizing the eschaton, triggering the inevitable zombie apocalypse or another Republican administration — to some, no doubt, one in the same.

Moreover, you’ll suffer! If your PC is off at night; well then, all those pesky updates will have to run while you are actually trying to work, trying to finish your radically over-due dissertation about Romance in America: The Myths of the Frog Prince, or trying to put those ever-so-important final touches on your resume, or, perhaps you’re writing the great-American-time-travel novel about relativity and love across the space-time continuum. Whatever it is, it’s important stuff all, right?

Between you and me and the blue screen, there is no need to tempt the fates by actually choosing to run the automated Windows Update and Crash system while trying to actually use the PC. To do that is foolish; to do that tempts fate.

If you’re going to do that, you might as well just stop now, randomly delete the first ten files you find that end with “DLL,” slide a Kraft single into the DVD drive, and pound your head directly on the keyboard for twenty minutes. It’s easier, tastier, more entertaining to your co-workers, and, in the end, will have much the same effect on your PC. Don’t forget to un-wrap the cheese first.

(Hey,Mac-head: don’t get smug, bozo. It happens to Mac’s too. Remember, it ain’t the machine, it ain’t the manufacturer, and it ain’t the OS. It’s the universe that’s laughing at you — and the universe is OS-agnostic. Although I have heard that Mac’s will actually read a properly formatted Kraft single.)

The counter argument to all this is, of course, wasteful energy consumption — the collective impact off all those PCs and laptops leaving huge Al Gore-sized, carbon footprints all over the global rug; wastefully burning up the world, leaving us to play frog in the global green house’s boiling pot of water, not noticing that it’s getting kinda warm and wet.

It just doesn’t feel “right,” leaving all these machines humming all the time. There are more and more and more every day. It just ain’t right, right?

So, hold on to your frogs— now there’s a better answer. The answer is still “nope.” But now, the answer is “nope, but…”

Now you can leave them on “smartly,” a princely green; leave ‘em on, tuned to the heavenly sixty cycles of sun and moon and automated software-tuned power efficiency.

The answer to all this is smart, power management software. It’s all about real-time fine-tuning — my third force, the move from sampling to monitoring — has found a terrific home in Green IT. It’s time to kiss the frog.

It’s about time: It’s a fracking computer after all. It should be able to tune itself, start itself up, do what needs to be done, and then gently fall to sleep.

Previous power management was pretty stupid — essentially offering two choices — asleep or awake; governed by a timeout. Not all answers are binary, and — at least in my case — the needs varied by time of day and day of the week. I needed the pesky PC’s perky during the day, and wanted them to embrace their lethargy the rest of the time. Life is not static. All in all, my goals are simple:

• Maximize energy savings and minimize user grumbling
• Be smart yet cheap about it
• Make it easy to set up and manage

The solution is a relatively unique software and management service. The software is called “Surveyor” — it’s made by Verdiem. Centrally managed and administered, it lets us tune the power management, by time of day, by day of the week, of individual PCs across our network. It even lets us do periodic “wake-up calls” to check for those required zombie updates, and to minimize the end-user grumble factor.

With Surveyor running, you still need to leave the PCs on— but now you’ve got the ability to twiddle and tweak the power management scheme, on the fly, to suit the time of day and the needs of the office. Now, they’re on when needed, up and responsive during working hours and asleep when they’re not needed, blissfully dreaming robotic dreams of world domination or plotting to kill Sarah Connors.

Power profiles can be changed on the fly. We set up two, one for the “Workday” (basically 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM) and another for evenings, nights and weekends.

Then, we got fancy — modifying the power settings on the fly to maximize the so-called “user experience” (or minimize the grumbling) and to minimize our carbon footprints. It was item two — the user grumbling — that took some fancy footwork with the scheduling.

We solved that with a couple of what I call “wake up calls” — essentially the system automatically sends out the magic “wake-on-LAN” packet to wake the machine up. It does it once at 8:00 AM so that those early to work are greeted by a wide-awake PC; once again at 9:00 AM so that the late arrivals also get a wide-awake PC. The 75-minute Workday timeout covers lunch.

Off-hours we get aggressive, switching promptly at 5:30 to the shorter timeouts, effectively putting all the un-used PC’s to sleep by 5:35 PM. We wake them all at 3:00 AM to process any pending updates — if there’s nothing to do, they’re back to sleep by 3:05 AM.

I’m a skeptic. So I metered it. The promised to save money, to knock tens of dollars off my electric bill for each PC, and to be green, seemed too good to be true.

And so, armed with my trusty “Kill-a-Watt,” the results convinced me. For a 24-hour period, the software dropped the power consumption of a typical workstation from 1.28 KWh in 24 hours, to about .62 KWh (with average usage), resulting in an estimated annual savings per PC of a little more than $20.

Even given the software costs (about $15 for the first year and $2/year thereafter), there’s a net savings of $5 per PC in the first year, with around $18 in subsequent years. For 100+ PC’s that’s real green. Besides, it’s worth it to unmask Kermit’s perfidy. Go ahead, kiss that frog. It’s easy.

I have been asked for an introduction to my work. The following is a collection of fourteen articles that I offer as an overview of the first two years of these writings. I have excerpted a bit from each article along with the link.

What is a Teacher?

“Teacher” is a lable. Sometimes it carries too much weight to be useful, and sometimes not enough. Sometimes a student crosses your path for only a moment, not long enough to make introductions, let alone to label the exchange, but long enough to offer something of value. Long enough to teach.

Exercises in Listening

Deliberate Mistakes

There is a myth, a script, that says the teacher does not, should not, make mistakes. It goes on to say that teacher mistakes should only seem to be mistakes to the student who does not yet understand the teacher’s true intent. Indeed, a clever teacher can arrange for the student to conclude this about nearly any misstep… Choosing to reveal your mistakes to the student changes this script.

Teaching Without Authority

Teaching without assumption of authority is a sort of stealth teaching. For those accustomed to being known as the teacher, this approach can be mysterious; how do you teach someone who does not consider themselves a student? Such skills can augment formal teaching and can extend a teacher’s range, but these skills can be hard to come by, especially if you are used to relying on your position to command attention.

This sort of subtle teaching is powerful because it comes in under the radar of defensiveness and fear. No one is being told they do not know enough, or that they should try harder. The “teacher” is simply solving problems as an equal. And learning happens.

Details

It is a teacher trap to think you can give all the information you need to give to a student, in any moment. No matter what the level of the student, it is not helpful to tell them everything they could be doing better. It’s too much.

Teaching Without Action

Another way to look at teaching is that our purpose is the student’s learning, and our actions should be in support of that purpose. So if the student is learning without us doing anything, we should stand back, do less, let them learn.

Finding the Teacher’s Clear Signal

A student can more accurately sense your disconnection from your own
integrity, from your own clarity, than they can your disconnection from any facts.

Seeking Truth with Curiosity and Wonder

As teachers we get mixed messages about curiosity. We are told to encourage wonder in our students but to stay on topic. We are told to stoke a desire to explore but not to upset the parents.

A delight in uncovering, unwrapping, and discovery produces agile, self-propelled students. How do we open the door to wonder and curiosity as an approach, and yet honor the limits of the world in which we teach?

Responding to Challenge

When possible, keep the conflict within the scope of your teaching. That is, include this issue, this challenge, this drama, whatever it is, in the study. Take the attitude that this conflict is not external to the study, and you will keep it in view rather than push it into hiding. The teacher who does not allow challenge to their teaching is missing a great range possibility for deep teaching.

Why Do You Teach?

What is the darkest, least flattering motivation you have for teaching? This is what constrains your deepest and most profound teaching ability. Left unseen and unknown, this is a blind spot you will teach around and a trap that will catch and prevent your best work.

Why Teach When There Are Books?

Words do not carry meaning, though they can, perhaps, point to meaning. This is part of the teacher’s job: to point to meaning. This requires us to have some sense of where to point to, and where to point from — the student.

Addressing Ego: When the Student Passes You

Look into the dark corners. In the privacy of your own mind and heart seek the extremes of possibilities: your talented student fails — are you relieved? The student succeeds brilliantly — have you any envy? The student comes to you asking advice. Are you reassured? “I need you,” the student says. What do you feel?

This can be a tangled set of motivations, even for the most self-aware of teachers. On the other side of this tangle, of course, waits our greatest prize: a student who goes farther than we thought our teaching could lead, who validates our deepest work as teachers. It is a tangle worth walking through.

Excavating Fear

As teachers we must be aware that our protected fears detract from our teaching ability. To avoid our fears we must look away from them, and we must keep looking away from them. Over time this focus on not seeing becomes an ingrained habit upon which we layer compelling explanations for why we do not dig in that spot. We cannot see this area, cannot use what is there, cannot go beyond. We limit our ability to teach anything that touches this.

On Being Done

It is easy to underestimate the power of a teacher’s advocacy to move forward, to clear a space for something new, especially when you are that teacher. A teacher’s help in making this transition can allow the student to focus on something new with confidence. A teacher’s approval for moving on, for being done, can be a great and freeing gift.

At this time of year I like to reflect on those people in my life who have given me the gift of their companionship, their insights, their spirit. Some of these are my teachers, some are my students, some are neither.

If you are part of a spiritual discipline that values thankfullness as a practice and attitude, consider that such appreciation of others is something that can be observed and emulated. As a teacher, can you show your students what gratitude might look like?

Be aware of the difference between lecturing about gratitude and practicing it. Too often we direct others in actions and attitudes we ourselves do not evince, without even the useful teaching of giving voice to our own struggles.

My offered practice: when teaching, make or find a time to enjoy the company of your students, or to talk about a subject you have affection for. Can you find some satisfaction in this time, in your students, in your subject? If you can find an ember of delight in this moment, breathe on it and seek to turn it into warmth. If you find that you appreciate the company or effort of your students, tell them this. Consider how you might also tell them without words.

Thank you, my readers, for your presence here.

In the course of teaching, especially deep teaching, teachers take on different aspects in order to reach their student. Sometimes this is as simple as presenting a confidence we do not feel, sometimes it is a more involved face or drama created for the student’s benefit. Any time we teach, we choose what facets of ourselves to show our student in order to best teach them. Our job, after all, is to help the student understand the material, perhaps the world, not to understand us.

In order to evoke class discussion and decrease drop-out rates, these teachers posed as students, using on-line personas with invented names, photos and profiles. When the teachers revealed these actions, some students and faculty reacted with outrage, feelings of betrayal, and questions about the teachers’ ethics.

Most of us were raised in a time when teachers could not easily pass as students. On-line this is no longer the case. We may find it unsettling, but our discomfort alone does not make it unethical. We must look beneath the surface of our assumptions, to the core of what we understand, to our touchstone: what is in the student’s best interest?

The instructor in this case benefited the student in at least two ways: first, increasing student involvement, as intended, by demonstrating how an involved student might act. And second, by reminding students that on-line all we know is what we are shown, all we have is masks. Even when photos and bios are a good semblance, they tell us little about the person behind them. These are both useful teachings.

As the world around us alters, we must be careful to distinguish between what is new to us and what is at odds with our best principles. Being surprised at how a teacher teaches does not mean we need also be outraged. The on-line world is a tool, and how we use it to teach is what is important.

For those on the path of excellence in teaching, it is to our advantage to understand how we use presentation in our teaching and why.

My offered practice: in the course of teaching, notice yourself presenting a facet of yourself, a persona, a mask. What is the benefit to the student of this particular presentation? In another moment consider the question again.

Email — you may be addicted to it, you may hate it, abuse it, love it, or eschew it. Whatever your relationship, troubled or otherwise, email is and continues to be one of the world’s few, new, great things. When it comes to “killer-apps,” it is the undefeated heavy-weight champion of the world. Email is the backbone of social and commercial intercourse. Commerce flows through it, along with pain and joy, and work and play, and many of the hours of my day.

While you may order that inflatable, remote-controlled zeppelin online, the acknowledgement nevertheless comes via email, as does the receipt, and the shipping updates.

Email is the truck that moves freight – light and heavy – on the information-super-goat-trail. Plain, simple, elegant, boring, your-grandma-has-an-AOL-address-type email remains the venerable heavy lifter of the online world.

Strangely, it has also become the de facto identity management tool. It is universally used to authenticate just who we are, on everything from my bank to the myriad of social and anti-social real-time networking sites. When we forget just who we are, it’s the delivery method of choice to jog the memory or to trigger a reset — ironically, given how totally insecure it really is, likened to a postcard.]

But, the core problem with email is not security. The real problem with email is it’s really stupid. It’s dumb as a bucket of overripe bananas. I mean it. It’s really god-awful stupid. It can’t help it. It was designed that way.

When push comes to pull, with email, you really don’t get much, and that illustrates its frailty and its amazing functionality.

With email, you see, all you really get is an “envelope” (consisting of minor variations on “From,” “To” a “Subject” along with tiny little bits of routing data that nobody pays attention to) and a giant blob of undifferentiated stuff called a “message body.” What’s in that message body is anything, unstructured, and undifferentiated – a blob.

What’s in there could be secret silly croonings to your one-true love, it could be the confirmation of your getaway flight to a land without extradition, or it could be my secret recipe for the world’s best gazpacho (and hence your necessary and immediate flight from justice).

With email, the medium hides the message. (If I keep this up, I’m likely to be haunted by McLuhan.)

Since its launch in 1971, we have improved it. We’ve tweaked it and twiddled it. We’ve made it better, making it easy, for example, to stuff it with bits of binary. We’ve said goodbye and good riddance to Uuencode and its ilk. Now digital civilians needn’t know a MIME type from a mime troupe. We’ve prettied it up, too — love it or hate it — with HTML, providing that ever-so-useful ability to deliver ugly fonts, in all the sizes, shapes, and colours your little heart could desire, rendering it pretty much unreadable

[For the record: I think I sent my first in the fall of 1979, using a service called EIES. I've got a copy of it around here someplace. It was a message to the fellow at the desk next to me, suggesting we get lunch at the Burrito King (tacos al carbon); truly important stuff!]

And, so, email moves the world, moving commerce and confirmations, in the wink of an eye. We’ve filled the tubes with everything from solicitations for various dysfunctional systems (whether erectile or congressional), to orders for green tea, multiple drafts, rewrites and painful iterations of your latest annual report, and those important PDF copies of your sinister plans for global domination through puppy adoption. They’re all sent on their respective ways via email.

Email is the go-to tool for everything from “donuts in the kitchen,” to presidential elections. But, inside, it’s still one dumb blob.

Blob, meet the software equivalent of Steve McQueen: Email2DB– one magnificent tool.

Steve McQueen (saving diners) in the Blob!

Email2DB has become a necessary cog in my machinery. It lets me take those dumb blobs and ferret out the necessary bits and pieces of the message, shaping them, cleaning them up, adding value in terms of structure, and then, gently slipping that data into a giant database.

In the best of all possible worlds, I wouldn’t have to do this. In that world, I wouldn’t be tasked with figuring out what to do with thousands email messages sent willy-nilly to just about any email address, person, or inanimate object you might care to imagine. But I do.

I am charged with capturing and organizing thousands of inquiries — inquiries that arrive in every way imaginable, some via a web form, others via email, and still others via such unspeakable things as (shudder) fax. I even think a few get slipped under the door at night by pixies. They’re all important, and regardless of origination, I want them all to end up in the same place — a database. Despite their disparate origins, I want them all channeled into the waiting, eager programmatic minds for review. I am all about the smooth flow of information. My motto: Never, ever, type it twice.

Email2DB keeps me true to my motto. In a nutshell, Email2DB “deconstructs” the email. It breaks it into its constituent parts, slicing and dicing the blob, parsing not only the header, but the contents, and gently slipping those deconstructed pieces into the database of your choice – in my case, the same-same database used to capture the content entered via a fancy online web form. Derrida would be proud.

Well known parts of the email —like the TO, FROM, SUBJECT, DATE — as well as some of the arcane bits and pieces of the underlying protocol (Originating IP, MessageID, ReplyTo) are a breeze to deconstruct.

They’re “pre-programmed” into the software, and with a single mouse click, you can pull those wee bits apart and slide them into a database. It talks to all-comers: Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Access, ODBC, yada yada yada. It’ll even write it out as a CSV if you’re living in 1996.

Once you’ve extracted the pieces you can use them for nefarious purposes: perhaps to construct a new message, sending back, for example, custom acknowledgments, or forwarding on reformatted confirmations, or simply adding them into a database for further processing. Email2DB takes email and turns the contents into fields and records in your favorite database.

The Taming of the Blob -- Smart Parsing for Dumb Blobs

Fancy stuff is easy. Within an hour I was rolling my own routines to parse more bits and pieces from the message, isolating the “First name” and “Last name” from the so-called “Friendly Name” portion of the “From” field. “Don’t stop there,” I said to myself.

So, I tackled the blob itself. With a little head-scratching, a smattering of OOP concepts under my belt (and a passing familiarity with VB), I was able to deconstruct bits of the body of the message itself, scanning through the text for familiar references that might match my mighty database elements.

With only a little fancy footwork, I was even able to detach any attachments, saving them with a unique “key” to a SharePoint document library, along with a PDF copy of the original message (also tagged with the same unique key).

The beastie will read and process messages from POP3, IMAP, and Exchange servers. It will also read and process messages directly from Outlook folders, including Exchange “Public Folders.” It has a fairly full-featured scripting language, and variables, once created are reusable.

While this is all well and good for me and mine, the beauty of this product is its universal application. There’s not a week goes by that someone on doesn’t ask me for the easy way to get information from a web site to a database. While there are a myriad of ways — some are easy and some are not. None are as easy as email.

Moreover, if it’s email generated by a web form, you control the structure. If the structure is predictable, Email2DB can easily grab that email, work with your structure, find the right bits and pieces, deconstruct them into the raw data you need, and then, easily slip that deconstructed data into an eagerly awaiting database. All is right with the world.

The requirements are minimal. The Email2DB software costs $300, $500 or $1,000, depending on features. I went with the $500 copy, as I needed the scripting engine and attachment processing. You need an email account (any will do, including those reached via SSL). Finally, I run it on a virtualized XP machine, rigged to autostart, autologin, and autorun, should anything interrupt its dedicated rounds.

Overall, the customization took about three days. I created scripts for:

• pattern matching to extract first and last names
• file-renaming to save copies of the original message and attachments to a SharePoint library
• Unique (per message) tags so that saved items could be retrieved as a group
• URL constructions so the database could include links to the original message and attachments
• Other custom flags for the source, date and time received, and type of inquiry

Whether you’re looking to manage the email meteor shower, stave off an invasion of unstoppable email blobs, or just want to turn a few dumb ones into smartly structured data, Email2DB can do it. It’s not often you can find software that will not only stop an alien invasion, but will also send you an acknowledgement when it’s done. Steve McQueen not included.

Enter a classroom of loud student voices and you are likely to find a teacher demanding silence. The method can vary; I have seen teachers write on boards, yell, drop books, pound desks, or stand quietly until the class follows.

However it is achieved, student silence is not student attention. If as a teacher you insist on student silence – and you would be in the minority if you did not – and you get it, take some moments to examine what you actually have. Student silence is usually passive compliance and nothing like engaged listening or captured attention.

Attention itself is a shifting quality, like water, and even the most focused of us drift. We can hardly expect our students to attend to our every word, nor to attend perfectly. So what can we expect? Very little. We can only expect what we teach and inspire.

In Ten Mistakes Teachers Make I write: “…teaching your students to listen deeply is one of your most important lessons, and there is no better way than to show them.”

If you want your students to be genuinely and deeply attentive you must show them how. Demonstrating listening means someone other than you is talking. What should they talk about? Just as having a response in mind changes the quality and effectiveness of your listening, telling someone what to say and then remaining quiet is not particularly good listening.

My offered practice: devote five minutes of your teaching session to listening to your students talk about the subject in as open a format as you can arrange. Practice listening to them as you would want them to listen to you.

Teach your students to speak. Show them how to listen. Demonstrate this often and well, and they will come to understand, from both sides, what listening can accomplish.

I rarely recommend video lectures because I prefer to read than to watch most presenters, but I found this TED lecture by Daniel Pink to be well worth my time. While he is addressing his points to business, they are also relevant to education.

He says: “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Research shows that if a problem may be solved mechanically, by following instructions, rewards motivate workers to better performance, but when a problem requires creativity, rewards instead degrade performance.

To apply this to education, if we believe that students learn mechanically and by following instructions, then rewards may motivate them. If not, if we believe that that learning is a creative act, then we must take serious note of this research and change our pedagogical processes accordingly.