Over the years I’ve seen and read many perspectives on “professional motherhood.” For a time, considering myself a professional made a lot of sense and appealed to me. Sitting around in my pajamas wasn’t going to cut it; I had a job I was responsible to accomplish. Professional also implies deliberate and intentional duty-fulfillment: a…
This is a great meal to make if you’re serving a crowd or if you’re taking a meal to another family. I have served it for birthday dinners when our extended families gather and just recently I made it when I was asked to take a meal to two families who had just had babies….
Before reading Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, it never occurred to me that I might make my own flour tortillas. Doesn’t it require extra tools? Wouldn’t it take a lot of time? No! It doesn’t! So, not only do I get to cross “tortillas” off my master pantry list, making one less thing I…
Is happiness an emotion reserved for those who have an easy life? Right now I have a child who thinks happiness is a life without math fact drill pages. And, he’s onto something that misery is dragging one’s feet and taking three hours to do what should take one three minutes. However, cause and effect…
In the fall and winter, we eat a lot of beans and soups. Cornbread is the perfect accompaniment to such meals. While the recipe I used to rely on from Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Breads is fine, this year I wanted to try something new. I had this thought that a cornbread that actually…
![Finding Motivation: Autonomy in [Home] School and [House] Work](https://simplyconvivial.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/autonomy-FB-copy.jpg)
This series was inspired by my reading of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink. Review: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us How Not to Motivate: Extrinsic Rewards Motivating without Stickers: Intrinsic Motivation Finding Motivation: Autonomy in [Home] School and [House] Work Finding Motivation: Mastery in [Home] School and…
So, if Daniel Pink, in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, is correct in his conclusions, extrinsic motivators should be taboo whenever the work we assign requires creativity or when it is something that touches personhood (virtue, learning). So what tactics are left to us? If we aren’t to use sticker…
As I reviewed on Friday, In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink argues that motivation and satisfaction center on having these three operators in our lives: Autonomy: the ability to have at least some self-direction. Mastery: the ability to improve ourselves in a field or skill. Purpose: the ability to contribute…
Back in January I listened to a library audio copy of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. It was one of those synchronicity books: unaware of the book, Matt had come across the RSA summary and shared it with me and then a day or two later I was browsing…
Awhile back our online book club read Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James Taylor. In it, he posited a three-stage development of and three-prong aspect of poetic – that is, not logically deduced – knowledge. He called the final stage “connatural,” which was a difficult term to grasp, but to make it simpler…