Since not a lot has been happening on the tech side (I'm still running through codecademy tutorials every night but I have 5 more days of school before the summer and am trying to make the best of them before going into full development mode), I figured now would be a good time to reflect on a subject that is very pertinent to my life at present: how to motivate students. I suppose this is an essay of sorts.
A fly on the wall of a teacher lounge would hear discussion on a variety of subjects: work, life, stress, administration, unions, politics, and, of course, students. Of those the latter is invariably the most common; interactions with students in one way or another, the good, bad, ugly, and wonderful, are the principal elements of our occupation. In a socioeconomically disadvantaged setting in particular, much talk surrounds the questions of why and how; why do our students struggle and how can we help them? Sometimes this pair of questions is most easily answered in reverse order.
By witnessing how our actions positively impact our students, we gain insights into why our students are the way they are. The other day, as I was eating lunch, one of my teaching colleagues made a comment that struck me in response to my minor lamentations about a small group of students who had collectively failed to meet our class goals and seemed trapped in a cycle of apathy towards not only school, but their also their futures. Specifically, I mentioned a student I had who had demonstrated a clear aptitude for math and ability to succeed but simply refused to try on a day to day basis despite my constant motivation, parental involvement, and other attempts at support. Over the course of the year I had developed a strong relationship with said student but was never able to fully leverage it to keep him consistently driven to work. On this particular day, I traded my usual positive affirmation and words of encouragement, a seeming broken record at that particular moment, for a curt "do you even care?" Those words triggered a look on that student that I could best characterize as bewilderment. In turn, I was myself bewildered - perhaps even annoyed - after that we, not him, we, had been through over the year, how could he give me such a look?
My experienced colleague immediately understood what I could not. I may be paraphrasing a bit, as it was not until after the words had set in that I was struck by their significance, but my fellow teacher basically said, "look, sometimes you are the only person in these kids' lives to express disappointment in them. They need that." My words to that student were precisely the product of that sentiment: disappointment. To be clear, my past interactions with this student had encompassed a wide array of emotions ranging from pride, that one time he got the highest grade on an assignment excelling beyond his peers, to anger, after he would occasionally act up in class. My anger always elicited the common student response of initial obstinance followed by eventual apology and forgiveness; that was a scenario that I was accustomed to dealing with. This situation, however, was fundamentally different as I had faltered from the traditional teaching paradigm of infinite encouragement and positivity. My misstep was illuminating.
After realizing that what I had conveyed to that student was genuine disappointment, I began to suspect that my colleague was perhaps correct in identifying the value of disappointment. The bewilderment I saw was a sure sign that disappointment of that sort was an emotion my student was not comfortable facing. I don't mean to suggest definitively that nobody has ever properly cared for this student (since disappointment is a product of caring for someone - think about it, you can't be disappointed if you're ambivalent). Indeed, contrary to popular belief, many of my students are strongly cared by their parents, teachers, and communities alike. At the very least, however, this student did not expect disappointment from me as I had set no precedent for it. And disappointment, I would learn soon, can be a powerful motivational force.
Thinking back to my own life, emotionally tangible instances of the disappointment of others in me are amongst my most vivid memories. I will never the look on my father's face the day that I failed my first driving test or the painful silence of the drive back home with my father, rather than myself, at the wheel. Nor will I forget the tone of Mr. Ball's voice when he caught me using the band room computer when I wasn't supposed to be, or the way that Coach Ehrenhaft walked away from me after realizing that I had skipped cross country camp. While minor failings by objective estimation, I was consumed by that feeling of having failed another and will accordingly never forget those moments. We all fail ourselves at one point or another and learn to manage that feeling ourselves, but my experience suggests that failing someone else is almost categorically different.
The day after my incident with said student, he came to me during lunch to chat. His words were straightforward: "I'm sorry I haven't been doing my work, I will try to try harder next time." My response was simply, "You won't try to try - you will try and you will succeed and I know that you can, so do it." Only time will tell whether this student will find success, but I see a minor victory in having forced that student to think about his actions, whether on his own behalf or for others. The how - the motivating force - was disappointment. This conflicts with the notion of always being a positive force as disappointment is inherently negative. Still, had I given this student my usual pat on the back with words about how could do better and should work harder to prove himself, I'm sure that my words would not have a spurred a second thought. So we know the how; what about the why?
All teachers know that it is important to set high standards for students. The reality is that this is difficult when all of our students are performing at an objectively low level and we must positively affirm whatever successes that we see. I have heard that studies have found that A students at low performing schools actually perform, when data is normalized, at about the level of C students at average schools. While I know that there is no easy fix to this conundrum, I do believe that my students lack have an insufficient number of people who are disappointed in them. More significantly, students often fail to be disappointed in themselves. This now unique to low income areas and not even unique to students; for most people the path of least resistance is to accept ourselves as is rather than change who we are whether we are talking about America's most commonly failed New Year's Resolution of going to the gym regularly or my own personal failure to keep my desk clean. It is when others hold us accountable and vest their interests with us that we succeed in such endeavors. Accountability is a key to this; there should be rewards for exceeding expectations and disincentives for failing to meet them.
Nobody likes it when somebody is disappointed in them. While varying in significance depending on your relationship with whoever is disappointed in you, disappointing someone is universally bad and something that one would like to avoid. While positivity is a proven driver of student performance, we must step back at times and question accepting barely passing classes and tests as the standard bimodal measure of success. For all the times that we encourage our students, we perhaps need not avoid wearing our disappointment on our sleeves at the times when our students have not only failed ourselves, but failed us. Intrinsic motivation is ideal but if we as teachers must carry the emotional weight of concern for these students and use guilt to jump start their motivation, then the end does justify the means and disappointment can, and perhaps ought, to be a part of a truly productive student-teacher relationship.
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