After School Help

The TED talk by Dave Eggers talked about how students tend to work better and are more motivated to work if they have one on one conversations with adults to get help and ideas. Dave Eggers and a group of other authors set up a shop in San Francisco in order to give students this help after school, purely on a volunteer basis. Dave gave such a great TED talk because of his personal experiences with this idea that he had, and how he utilized this idea that eventually became a worldwide phenomenon to help students everywhere. This idea of intrinsic motivation to work harder and to get help for homework goes along with many other ideas in other TED talks that I have seen, and this is something that is extremely undervalued in schools and in the workplace in modern society. Schools still use the carrot-and-stick concept of motivation, in that if you do "good" work, you are "rewarded" with a good grade and if you do "bad" work you are "punished" with a bad grade and the option of failure of the class. The same is used in the workplace, with raises and bonuses for good work, overtime and the possibility of being fired for bad work. This process has been used for many years, but studies now show that people work harder when they are working for the joy of working on something meaningful. The study center that Dave Eggers and other authors set up also shows that students are willing to learn and get better, but feel more inclined to do so on their own terms, not because a teacher or parent forces them to. The same concept can be used in other areas of school as well as in the workplace. Grades in schools need to be eliminated in order to encourage true learning, and workplaces need to incorporate the creativity of their employees to get new ideas. Revolutionaries like Eggers and others will eventually show the world the true value of intrinsic motivation, as they already have begun to do.