Sometimes the best way to generate eagerness and involvement is to create competition. Whether it is high- stakes or playful, pitting students against one another in pedagogical settings can be fun. It can also be risky. At times, competition in classrooms can take a toll on learning and create more bad feelings than good. Competition may send unintended messages of superiority and inferiority to the winners and the losers. Competition may ratchet up the energy so that eagerness turns into melee and long- term educational goals are forfeited for short- term classroom engagement. When participation is expected in classroom competitions, students likely do not have the choice to opt out. Some already know they will fail in front of their peers. Some choose to be goofy or intentionally wrong rather than show their peers how “smart” or “dumb” they are. Some cannot perform under pressure: noise and frantic energy block their ability to think on the spot. Our whole lives can become a competition when we habitually judge who is better or worse than we are. In classroom contests, incentives like trinkets, privileges, or bragging rights raise the ante. The “three Be’s” can provide some guidance for monitoring the influence of competition in the classroom: • Be wise about the effects of competition for academic purposes. • Be savvy about which students may be less able to access their knowledge during confrontational recall. • Be thoughtful about whether competition is contributing to or detracting from educational goals and achievements. We are all competitive by nature, and such impulse can help people achieve things they would never accomplish otherwise . . . . Appeal sparingly to the competitive urge . . . because competition has only limited usefulness.