Students...start your engines

So all these years we have, basically, been doing it "wrong". After reading Drive by Dan Pink and discussing it at school with my teachers and friends, I realize the truth and importance of the "right" motivation. Of course, there are different situations and different personalities, but there are also different ways of approaching motivation. There are many ways to motivate and stir up creativity in people other than the typical “carrots and sticks” as Pink points out.
School has a certain monotonous nature. Teachers assign homework, depending on the class the assignment is usually around the same format year-round. They assign the homework, and basically your reward is your grade. It turns into work, and I may say it can be dreadful. Teachers want their students to love to learn, but it gets hard when your homework tends to suck all the joy out of learning. That is why I am so glad our school has opened up to the idea of 20 percent time. This year seniors have two days out of the week to work on a project. Anything we would like to do. This, honestly, gives me more motivation to go to school. I want to show everyone what I can do and I want to work hard on it.
In our classes, our teachers have opened up the floor and their lesson plans. We get to have some say in what we want to learn. This makes the class more interesting and exciting. It turns into fun; play. This book would have never been a book that I would have picked up on my own. It may have been directed more to the work/business setting but it works in the school setting as well. I’m glad I was assigned to read Drive because not only is it helping me learn and discover new things in my school work, but it also helped me realize what my teachers go through to try to get us to love to learn and to motivate us.

Intrinsic motivation in Chinquapin

As Chapter 1 of Drive explains, Motivation 2.0 works by rewarding people for doing a good job, punishing them when things are not working, and keeping a very close eye on them. As we can see by reading the novel, this sort of structure is being less frequently used in business and replaced by a self-driven motivation. My question is, wouldn't this also work in Chinquapin?

People who work using intrinsic motivation do jobs that are interesting- non-routine work. These people are self-motivated, and therefore they need to be less monitored. I saw Chinquapin take a similar direction last year with the addition of a new rule- high school guys on the high honor roll didn't need to attend night study hall. Instead, these guys did their homework in their own dormitory, and, every now-and-then, on their own beds. As the year culminated, these students did pretty well.

Now, I don't know if Ray, who came up with this idea, had read Drive before, but this new rule showed a perfect example of how intrinsic motivation works. The students were were not monitored, and still managed to have positive results on their tests and quizzes. They were not monitored, forcing them to be self-driven and to work at their own pace . This privilege set up a "purpose maximizer" environment. Students were able to turn on their stereo and find more creative ways to do their homework, making the task more enjoyable.

I know there are many other ways to add intrinsic motivation to Chinquapin, but the positive result of this "experiment" by Ray could lead to Chinquapin being run by a new "operating system", something I definitely wouldn't mind.