If you want to encourage students to complete a project or assignment with creativity, innovation, and passion, what's the best tool to motivate them?

a. offer a high grade
b. threaten a low grade
c. make it a competition
d. offer a gift certificate to GameStop
e. chocolate covered iPod
f. none of the above

According to Daniel Pink's latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the answer is f, as in fail. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that all of the above carrots and sticks actually reduce performance and undermine motivation. When it comes to tasks that require problem solving or other right brain activities, people perform best when they are given autonomy over their tasks, opportunity for mastery in their field, and a sense that the task has a clear and meaningful purpose.

Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics will find much familiar, but Pink packages many of these ideas in a new, and even more useful form.

In the following video from a TED conference, Pink offers a brief and compelling overview of his argument. His emphasis here is on business, but educators wouldn't have to stretch too far to see how it applies to the classroom. However, the book does dedicate a significant number of pages directly to how we need to radically shift the way we motivate our students.

Recently, I applied this new way of motivation to my English students. Essentially I gave them some 20% time to work on any project of their choosing. I did encourage them to do something that was worth doing and had a greater purpose. Some examples of what they came up with:

• Two students, disgusted with the fact that Monterey was given an F by the American Lung Association for smoking ordinances, wrote letters to the the local newspapers here and here. Since then the Monterey City Council unanimously voted to dramatically restrict smoking in public places.
• Ten students have decided that they want to adopt a 3rd grade class at a local underfunded school and encourage them to read by giving lessons on children's books they love. 
• Six students are planning a blood drive with a goal to break a school-wide record for pints donated. They're currently scheming to perform the most persuasive series of assembly announcements. Ever.
• Seven students are organizing a shoe and clothing drive for Haiti.
• Two students decided they want to be published journalists. Look for their first piece to be printed in Off 68 within a couple weeks.
• A couple students are working to build a certain Yurt. 

"The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited," says an old friend of mine on Facebook. I tend to agree. What's up with this fascination so many of us hold for zombies? I'll leave that to the psych department of my school, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that our Id can indulge its hunger for inflicting violence without that pestering Super Ego telling us that such behavior is inappropriate. There's nothing inappropriate with unloading a twelve gauge in the face of the undead. The morality is delightfully simple. I would argue that this is the device behind the success of Tarrantino's Inglourious Basterds--Nazis being the closest thing we've seen to people we can kill with a free conscious. This device is why I picked up World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. However, it has nothing to do with why I liked the book so much.

Sure, there's some good zombie killing satisfaction to be had in WWZ, but what makes this novel most interesting is what it reveals about international diplomacy, military strategy, and world cultures.

The story takes place after the global zombie outbreak has been quelled and is told in the form of interviews of people around the world who experienced the crisis. We meet generals, soldiers, spies, orphaned children, and mercenaries. We hear from the Chinese doctor who discovered the first case in a rural village--a village created by citizens of an older village destroyed by the Three Gorges Dam. As news about the outbreak spreads around the world, most nations respond with skepticism--who would believe that an infection really could cause the dead to walk and eat other humans? The Israelis would. According to the Brooks' world, a nation with their history, always forced to be on guard, take unlikely threats seriously. They urge people, including Palestinians, to establish quarantine zones, which is met with an understandable lack of trust.

How does South Africa with its history of apartheid respond to a zombie invasion? How would a blind victim of the bombing of Hiroshima survive a year in the infested wilderness? How would Cuba's 50-year trade embargo help it become an economic superpower during a zombie crisis? The questions aren't practical, but the answers are revealing.

The novel also addresses some of the issues our current military faces. Wired Magazine recently published Noah Schatman's "The End of the Air War," which explains why America's dominant Air Force isn't useful in conflicts like Afghanistan. With the ubiquity of information and news, bombing a village is no longer a good way to make peace. The rules have changed.

In a zombie war the rules change even more drastically. What good is an expensive stealth bomber when fighting an enemy that can't tie a shoe, much less use radar. World War Z also exposes the importance of psychological warfare simply because zombies are immune to it. You can't discourage a zombie army into thinking the war is hopeless the way the allies did in World War I. They just want brains, and they're willing to seal-walk their exploded torso into a wall of bullets to get them. History books tell us World War II was a "Total War." World War Z shows us how history books lie. Expect a novel about zombies. Get a lesson in the economics and psychology of warfare.

I read somewhere that the job of a novelist is to send a character up a tree and then shake that tree to try to get him to fall out. As he hangs on, we gain insight into the character. Max Brooks sends our globalized society up a tree and shakes the hell out of it revealing insight similar to what one might find in Foreign Affairs or The Economist.