Motivation trumps a burning room

I recently posted about an effort to get students to understand inequality by discussing it as a room on fire – with the idea that a lucky few will always escape but that the failure of others to escape cannot be written off as a lack of motivation.  This morning, I graded a few rewritten essays and found that students had added a number of structural elements that their initial essays lacked while maintaining individualistic conclusions centered on motivation.

And people say that sociology is common sense!