Unmotivated

I have been listening to some of my fellow teachers discuss how students are not doing their work, and how horrible it is, and how hard the teachers worked when they were in school.

I didn't do squat.

I was notorious for sleeping in class and falling out of my desk. The whole business just started too early and was pretty boring, in my opinion. I only tried hard enough to make good enough grades to keep the good student discount on the car insurance. Dad had promised me he'd yank the car if I didn't do that.

I wasn't much better in college. Thank goodness they didn't count attendance back in the day. I would roll out of bed around noon, watch All My Children, then head to my afternoon classes. I went to morning classes only to find out when the midterms and finals were going to be held.

I was the classic underachieving, non-motivated student.

One exception to this was American History my sophomore year of high school. I loved American History. It was that year that I learned to love biographies, especially biographies of historical figures.

My junior year, I had the same teacher, but the subject was World History. Yuck. I starting sleeping in class.

My teacher wouldn't let me sleep in peace, however. He wanted to know "what my problem was". So I told him. I told him we weren't reading about people, we were reading about events, and it was boring. Sorry, I needed to nap.

His response was quite unusual. He gave me the task of telling the class about one historical figure from whatever period we were studying. Every Friday, I had to get up in front of the class and give a little speech about some person the teacher would assign me on Monday. I promised not to sleep anymore if I didn't have to do this, but he insisted. Instead a taking a quiz over the material, I had to talk about my person.

The outcome of this is that I became more interested in the events we were studying because I was reading about the people involved in the events. I also learned I liked telling people about things I had read. That was probably the planting of the seed that would grow into me being a teacher.

This teacher thought out of the box and managed to motivate a very drowsy girl.  I now admire his creativity and also the fact that he just didn't lecture me about my laziness. He tried to find a way to reach me.

I also get annoyed when kids don't finish assignments and only half-try when we are doing projects. Maybe I need to look a little harder at the assignment and figure out why the kids aren't excited about doing it. Maybe I should look a little closer at the student and try to figure out some angle that would let me reach him or her.

Unmotivated students have always existed. We really need to pull out every trick from our magic bags to reach them.