Dear colleague,
The longer I teach and think about student motivation, the more direct I tend to get. For example, the other day during a talk to AP teachers, I said, rather bluntly, that an AP student who works hard primarily to get a grade or earn college credit is actually a poorly motivated student. In The Will to Learn, I put it this way:
A person who does a thing — who even does it well — is not necessarily a person who cares about what they've done. Instead, the person can be driven by care for the carrots or the sticks. This, in my observation, is the condition of most folks who do well in our secondary schools today. They want the stuff that educational success gets them — the degree, the salary, the job — while not being all that interested in the education itself.
What I'd like to put forth in this book is that such a person, regardless of grades or achievement, is actually a poorly motivated human soul. They'll do work, but it won't be done from the fullness of their agency. And so, eventually, they'll find themselves alienated from the fundamental goodness of learning. They'll lose the sensory capacity for tasting and seeing that an education is good.
I give this point all the time, and the problem with giving a point all the time is that it becomes easy to get blunt with it. And with that bluntness, a carelessness or arrogance can be communicated.
And so what I'm writing about today is the reality that being poorly motivated isn't something anyone should be ashamed of. And we should never cast aspersion on a student who is poorly motivated in school. Because, as I also say all the time, students want to want to learn. They'd much prefer the state of motivation to the state of apathy. We are all alike in this preference.
So, when you next work with a student or a parent who betrays a grade-mongering mentality toward school (or a college-credit-mongering or an accolades-mongering), the thing to never do is judge them harshly for this or look down at them. The thing to do is treat them like a human being brimming with dignity and do the kinds of things that can help the seeds of true care grow. You can tend the soil. You can water and weed.
And like any good gardener knows (I am not one, but I know some), the job is always to partner with the power that is in the seeds.
These ideas keep me attached to the ground very often. I hope they help you as well.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. I don't know that I really paid off the title in the article above. What I'm trying to say is, we don't want to shame the unmotivated because shame is a terrible and counterproductive tool. It is also a deceitful tool — it seems like it works sometimes, but what it actually does is poisons the soul. (Shame is a like a fertilizer laced with slow-working poison.)
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