Piute County School District,

This is the 100th Monday Motivation message since I started sending them out in the fall of 2019. They are primarily a collection of stories. Stories are a powerful motivational and teaching force. We can remember a good story for a lifetime and forget a powerpoint presentation in an instant. Before written languages there was only storytelling. As crazy as it may sound, some of the most intelligent minds of ancient Greece thought that writing would make humans less intelligent and more forgetful. When speaking of writing, the great philosopher Socrates said, 

“In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” 

There is some humorous irony in that Socrates’s stories and philosophy may not have survived the last two and a half thousand years had they not been written by his student Plato. However, I don’t believe Socrates is entirely wrong. There is a certain joy in remembrance we get from spoken stories. In the C.S. Lewis classic The Horse And His Boy there are a couple lines that emphasize my point, “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”

I hope the Monday Motivation stories are helpful and memorable. If you would like to use any of the stories, here is a link to all of the text and images for the 100 Monday Motivations.  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/106grmQ8fiuJArpv_thi3nW66Ex01lqFj?usp=sharing

Tell good stories in week 25,

Koby