The Few, The Motivated

This image was found on the computer I'm working at, I don't know where it's from.

Dr. Lankford brought up an interesting topic, which is motivation. Although I'm not ePortfolio/blog-savvy enough to really discuss the internet's role or anything, I thought I'd unleash a short rant about motivation.

This might be a curious topic for me to explore, after all, I'm pretty unmovitaved in a lot of aspects of life, but here I am writing a slurry of blog posts weeks before the class has begun. I haven't thought about exactly why, obviously these are addicting but WHY? I don't know, but I'm not really going to find out in this one.

On Motivation

I define motivation as someone's drive to do something. And since I'm preaching from my pedestal, I'd like to submit that there are inferior and superior species of motivation. Case in point here is the student's motivation in school. A lot of people go to school and get stellar grades, go to every class, get A's on every test, and cry when they don't. They work harder than anyone else in the class. Being an honors seminar, I'm sure this personality isn't foreign to anyone who would read this. But what's motivating these people? Since I've never been one, I couldn't say. Maybe if someone like that reads this, they can offer some insight in the comments section? But anyway...

It's pretty sad, but I've noticed that (especially in highschool) I never went to class (or school in general) thinking, "I'm going to go learn as much as I can today!" It's ironic that "education" and "learning" don't seem to have a whole lot to do with each other. My grades were pretty bad, and then they got better because I figured out you're not actually supposed to LEARN anything, you're just supposed to retain enough information in your brain until it needs to be squeezed out on that test paper. Like a sponge. You're not supposed to be a sponge. Sure, I got good at it, but was I motivated? I dont' think so.

I took my very first online class at Foothill and enjoyed it. It was history, and history has been one of my least favorite subjects. The material was fine, the classes were mind numbing. Rewind to sophomore year (is there an 'o' in that?)

Its the first day of my "History of the World" or some such thing class. I get into the classroom, it's flourescent lights are flickering on and off, people are coughing and lounging around. I sit next to a few girls I think are good looking and wait to see what happens. So the teacher is already there, but I wouldn't have noticed because he was sitting so still in his chair behind a massive desk, like some sort of lizard that freezes when it thinks its about to be eaten. The bell rings for class to start, he takes attendance. My name was probably the last words he spoke at me. He gets up and goes to the board, writes "Mr. BadTeacher", the name is changed because I'm not that much of an $#@%#. "Please take out an atlas and a large paper, draw a colored map of Africa labeling all major cities and land marks." The next day we did Europe. The next day we did South America. You get the idea. Occaisionally between large maps we would be given big charts and a stack of index cards with information on them, to be copied into our charts. Our test was to label every country in the world.

Obviously, this class seems laughably easy. But you might be suprised to find out that this honors student got a D in the class. Needless to say, I remember nothing. Now back to Dr. Feig's online class, I'm a little more mature about my learning, but the format initially seemed the same. A website of information and here's a bunch of topics, write me 9 essays or so. But when I got the site it was different. The teacher had made the effort of finding about a million resources online, and linked them under different categories in different sections that corresponded with units in the book. The links were expansive. I spent hours going from link to link, there were pictures, sound clips, video clips. I even found myself going to sites not listed, searching in the databases of Wikipedia.org and dictionary.com, and other such resources. I actually learned a lot because I was allowed to pick what I wished to learn about in depth, and things I didn't really care about I could at least gloss over in an entertaining and comprehensive package.

The same freedom was offered in my online music class. We had a ton of units, but a student only had to accumulate a certain number of points to get the grade they wanted. I found myself learning in depth about things I previously only had a mild interest in. I wasn't forced to learn things I had no connection to or didn't care about, like Salsa (sorry salsa fans).

I guess the lesson I've learned from these, is that students really appreciate freedom. I understand when a kid is young, he might not care about anything and perhaps the scheduled and forced class list is what he or she needs. But a motivated student, and I mean really motivated to learn, benefits so much more from the flexible structure and wealth of information that can be presented online.