If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.

You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.

Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.

Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?