When grades are your only motivation, what will you do after graduation?
Performance review? That hardly seems to be the motivation for virtually anyone to do good work. Money? That’s a vicious circle of motivation – and there’s not a lot of evidence that you’ll find yourself very happy down the road.
Most people I know are motivated by one of two things.
- Doing work to be able to take care of themselves and the people they love.
- Doing work that creates the change they seek to make – enhances the lives of the people they come in contact with, improves society, community, and the world, or just generally makes brings joy into the universe.
It is, of course, great when those two things go together. But what I want to point out is that in neither of those scenarios does a grade, either implicit or explicit, affect the work you’re doing.
We need to, earlier and more consistently, divorce the idea of success and grades – because after graduation, grades are of little use. When we train our young people to equate grades with success, we are setting them up for either failure, or at the very least a post-school period of shifting their mindset.