Most teachers see two piles on their desks-merit stickers and detention slips-but these are not true opposites. They are the same tool fueled by adult-driven motivation, which can undermine sustainable student engagement.
They are not opposites. They are the same tool held at either end, and both run on the same fuel. That fuel is you.
The teacher as the plug point
Every time a reward or a sanction powers a child’s behaviour, the power source sits at the front of the room. The child works because of what the adult will do afterwards. Multiply that by forty, and you have forty small motors, all wired back to a single socket.
Which is fine on a Monday when you have slept. It is less fine in week nine, or on the morning your own mother is in hospital, or during the fortnight you are marking until midnight. The moment the socket loses power, the whole room stalls. And then you are blamed, mostly by yourself, for a system that was never built to survive your being tired.
We wrote recently about the thirty-two thousand teachers South Africa has lost in five years, and about young teachers defeated not by their subject but by the room. This is one small, unglamorous thread in that story. Much of what exhausts a teacher is not the teaching. It is being the sole engine of everybody else’s reasons.
What the research actually found
Beth Hennessey and Teresa Amabile spent careers mapping what flattens a person’s own motivation, and the list is uncomfortably familiar: expected rewards, being evaluated, competition, surveillance, and working against the clock. Alfie Kohn gathered much of this into Punished by Rewards (1993), whose title carries the whole argument. Rewards do not merely fail to build lasting interest. They can quietly replace it.
Picture a shopkeeper in Salt River who has always swept his own pavement because it is his pavement. The council starts paying him fifty rand a week to do it. The sweeping continues. But the week the payment stops, so does the broom, and he feels faintly cheated for having been asked. Nothing was added. Something was swapped out.
This practical approach shows that intrinsic motivation is the only classroom system that keeps running when you are not looking because the reason lives inside the child, not just in external rewards or punishments.
We are not saying abolish structure.
Let us be honest about the room. In an overcrowded class, structure is not optional, and it is not a failure of nerve. It is survival.
The distinction that matters is not between having consequences and having none. It is between consequence as protocol and consequence as mood.
We already know the difference in our bones, because we have lived it every winter. Load-shedding on a published schedule is an irritation. You cook early, you charge what needs charging, you get on with your evening. The same number of hours off, arriving without warning, is something else entirely. You stop planning. You start watching the lights, waiting to see what the night will do to you. Identical darkness, completely different life.
Protocol is the schedule. It was decided in a calm week; it applies to everyone, and carrying it out costs you almost nothing in the moment. Mood is the unannounced outage. It demands a fresh judgement in every incident, and it is those hundred small fresh judgements, far more than the syllabus, that leave a teacher hollow by Thursday.
Protocol is lighter to carry. It is also fairer, which is the same thing seen from the learner’s desk.
The cheapest change available
“Good job” is a receipt. It proves a transaction happened and the adult was satisfied, and there is nothing on it you can use tomorrow.
“You changed your mind halfway through and told us why” is a recipe. It costs the same breath, but the child can make the dish again on a day when you are not in the building.
That is not extra labour. It is the same labour, aimed slightly differently.
The more hopeful half of Hennessey’s work is the part most often skipped. She found that motivation appears to be teachable. Children who watched adults speak openly about why something interested them, and were invited to discuss it themselves, held on to that motivation even when rewards were later waved in front of them. She called it immunisation, and the word is doing real work. A vaccine does not supply the defence. It teaches the body to make its own, so that the doctor need not come every morning.
A teacher talking about why their subject grips them is not an additional task. It is the lesson, with the quiet part said out loud.
The point of all this
None of this replaces smaller classes, decent pay, or a staffroom that is not empty. Those are structural, and we should keep saying so.
Most classroom motivation relies on tanker work-constant external inputs, while helping students sink a borehole is slower but creates a lasting internal resource that endures bad weeks.
Most classroom motivation is tanker work. The alternative is not softer. It is simply lighter to carry, and it survives your bad weeks.
So perhaps the better question is not which pile on the desk to reach for.
It is this: what would this child do if nobody were watching?
Build towards that answer, and one day you will be able to take a sick day without the room falling apart. Which, for most teachers I know, would be a small miracle worth having.
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