To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.

If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

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

We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, . . . has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' . . . it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.

We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.

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