Motivation

10.04.10 By Stephen Yang

Early last week, 16 out of 31 ELA juniors arrived to my homeroom class and commenced the first of a series of formative assessments that will measure their progress over the course of this term.  My objective for this assessment was to gather data on the students’ ability to identify the characteristics of a high-quality SAT essay, and through several prompts, they answered questions concerning grammatical conventions, essay structure, idea development, voice, and word choice.  When I reviewed their responses I discovered that 7 out of 16 felt confident that their thesis statements were clear, yet only 5 of 16 were able to understand the essay question and articulate their main ideas; the same group of five students were also able to employ examples-albeit very general ones-from their personal lives to strengthen their arguments.  However, only three of them had enough time to write a conclusion.  Another 3 out of 16 wrote essays containing five paragraphs, and 4 out of 16 considered their writing creative and their word choices adequate.  Only 3 out of 16 were able to spot common grammatical errors.  None knew how to fix them.

During the same period later that week, I taught a mini lesson on run-on sentences, and spent two-thirds of my time on comma splices and independent clauses.  Of the 21 students that made it to class that day, only 13 were able to define the run-on sentence by the end of the lesson.  Two of them used “independent clause” in their definitions.  Half of the students spelled semicolon: “simicolon,” and all but seven students wrote that commas should be used to fix run-on sentences.  One female student wrote “fan boys” as a way to fix this common grammatical mistake.

Obviously, data like this can frustrate, and all too often we hear professionals as well as laypeople cite the lack of student motivation as the major reason why adolescents can’t seem to learn basic core subject content.  Take, for example, a recent article published in Newsweek entitled “Why School ‘Reform’ Fails: Student motivation is the problem.”  In it, the author argues, “Since the 1960s, waves of ‘reform’ have failed to produce meaningful achievement gains.”  And these “‘reforms’ have disappointed for two reasons.  First, no one has discovered transformative changes in curriculum or pedagogy, especially for inner-city schools…[and] the larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation…motivation has weakened because more students…don’t like school, don’t work hard, and don’t do well.”

What does this mean? “Against these realities, school ‘reform’ is blissfully evasive…what school ‘reform’ promises is more disillusion.”

Indeed, unmotivated students make teaching-and yes, reformation-a challenge.  And up until yesterday, I can assure you that my modus operandi for making sense of why urban students don’t perform at grade level was to complain about their socioeconomic status and/or problems at home.  But then I read one of my student’s independent reading logs, in which he wrote, “So I have considered myself a reader.  I have never considered myself a reader.  The reason is that I hate reading more then my life.  Reading kind of sucks because it takes a lot of time to read.  I don’t have that much time to waste on books.  I would rather watch movies because it would only take about 2 to 3 hours to finish a movie and learn the entire story, which is 10 times faster then reading a book…I feel like I am a real reader right now…reading Metamorphosis [Kafka] is making me proud of myself.  The reason is that this book is a college level book and I feel really smart…maybe I would connect this book to the world issue of making fun of different people.  Maybe [Gregor] might change into his normal self in the end of the book.  Probably in the end, he would not want to change back into his normal self again.”

Clear.

Inquisitive.

Critical thinking.

Engagement.

Confidence.

Motivation.

Dare I say, run-on sentence free?

This reading log reveals that student motivation does exist, though not always in the form we expect to see it manifested.  For example, I never thought that pushing this student to read Kafka would make him feel like a “real reader,” but for some reason the idea of reading college-level text about a man metamorphosing into a giant hairy bug appealed to him.  All along he was hiding his motivation in a composition notebook.

The data I gathered this week tells me that there’s a lot more work my class and I need to do with “the basics.”  I can reasonably expect that during some of these days I’ll feel like a dentist performing root canal surgery, but I know I can (and need) to find a way to motivate my students.  Sure, reform promises have brought about disillusionment for some, but as a teacher I’m finally ready to cross “lack of student motivation” from my list of reasons why students don’t perform well.  Why? Because all students are motivated by something, and all teachers can motivate their students. 

Education reform is happening right now, and we can see it at work in the quiet student who does his homework every evening and believes he’s little smarter and more capable today than he was yesterday.