What gets you through the day may not get you through the night

"...engagement as a route to mastery is a powerful force in our personal lives. While omplying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a statisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. the former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night."

Dan Pink wrote these words in his book Dive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. For me as a classroom teacher, his words carry a mean punch.

I am more than ever committed to creating a learning environment for my students where they can engage in more autonomy in their learning so that they can develop mastery.

This inspired me to clean out my school's science prep room, which had become a dumping ground for storage, and turn it into a science experiment room where students can actively engage in science experiments of the students choice.

The first observation I made was that too often teachers blame students misbehavior on the kid when really we should see the misbehaviour as a message - and the message may be that we are not providng children with an autonomous and engaging curriculum.

Just today, I had a grade 8 boy design and impliment an experiment that he thought of. The ironic part is that when I planned the experiment for him and asked him to do it a week ago he accomplished absolutely nothing and was even less engaged. But when he felt a sense of autonomy, he became rather productive.

Sadly, he is the kind of boy that would typically be given no autonomy because he misbehaves and is difficult to trust. It's a vicious cycle that both the boy and teachers continue to fall into - over and over again.

Pink, Godin, Kohn and asymptotes

Dan Pink and Seth Godin both refer to asymptotes in their books Drive and Linchpin.


I found myself agreeing with Seth Godin when he wrote, "asymptotes are sort of boring." But my tune quickly changed after reading both Dan Pink's book Drive and Godin's Linchpin. I found myself oddly fascinated with how they used analytic geometery to show how learning mastery can be achieved.


Essentially, asymptotes occur when you have a line that forever approaches a point but never gets there.



Pink explains in his book Drive:

This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really close to it... The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

I love how Pink shows the cons of pursuing mastery is at the same time the very reason mastery is so appealing.



Godin takes a slightly different perspective on the pursuit of mastery in his book Linchpin:

Ten percent of applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in their class. Of course, it's impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an 820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year. Perfection, apparently, is not sufficient. 

We have a lot of bean counters in our world. They are busy little people who love to count stuff - and in education, these bean counters love to add up grades. In doing so they wrap themselves in a blanket of grades. Keep in mind though that this blanket is wholy and entirely fabricated. 

Grades are a man-made attempt at counting something that you can't count - mastery of learning. How many students are duped into thinking that the pursuit of that A or 100% is the asymptote they should be striving for?

We set kids up for failure when we use grades to guide students as they pursue mastery, because they encourage students to think of learning mastery as linear, as opposed to an asymptote.

When students come to see the pursuit of mastery as a destination, rather than a journey, they can't understand how anyone could be attracted to something that is so elusive and so frustrating.

Alfie Kohn explains how research has come to differentiate between students who have a 'learning orientation' and a 'grades orientation'.

Did you notice what I labelled the y-axis? Can you see how the objective of an asymptote changes depending on whether you put learning or grades on your y-axis?

This is exactly why I become so bothered when I see educators become distracted by attempting to define and standardize what constitutes as an A or 90%, when the real problem is that grades, by their very nature, undermine learning and mastery.

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.