MOTAL MYSTERY! A mystery brings up Maslow’s​Hierarchy find out why!​

he Mystery of the Disappearing Logo
MOTAL has a mystery on its hands. Perhaps our readers have some thoughts on how to solve it. But first, please bear with us in sharing some background. The Covid-19 pandemic has altered practices for our homes and communities in so many ways. The Museum of Teaching and Learning has undergone major changes: Our traveling exhibitions are in storage and gatherings are postponed indefinitely. Our mini-museum that also serves as our headquarters office went from being a cozy and convivial place of business to an empty place when we all had to start working at home. Four interns, our administrative assistant, and our executive director went their separate ways to homes in Los Angeles, Pomona, Montclair, Corona, Anaheim, and Fullerton, California.


The office has always been identified from the street by the MOTAL logo, a logo that was originally created by Founder Greta Nagel in 2004 and then updated by a Cal State Fullerton graphic design intern in 2006.


You can see it on the window behind Norma Ames and former intern Gefei Zhang.

As with most logos, the shapes in the design hold meaning. The triangle and the spiral represent the observation that triangles (or pyramids) and spirals (or circles) are very prominent among the visuals that represent key theories and practices in education.

For example, many readers are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy shown below.

Not as familiar, but important is a model used to illustrate components of Project-Based Learning (PBL).

Well, we don’t want you to be kept in suspense any longer. Here is our mystery. The red and white LOGO has DISAPPEARED from our window!

Just a hint of the triangular outline remains. The rest has, as you can see, been scraped off. It has been several weeks now and no other marks or graffiti have appeared. The neighboring insurance and real estate offices have no leads to share.

Anyway, the pandemic has brought with it many problems. Unlike some predicaments, this is one we can solve some day; we’ll just have to dip into our MOTAL pockets to apply a new logo. In the meantime, we have a puzzling mystery on our hands and we DON'T LIKE IT ONE BIT. Anyone with information leading to the apprehension of the culprit(s) will get a reward . . . and may want to help us decide the consequences. We could consider how to apply restorative justice.


Submitted by Greta Nagel
Founding President and CEO