Self-motivation
Well, it’s been a fairly busy December. Two new team members who are working with 7th graders have arrived, and we’ve gotten our afterschool program under way. It’s a bit unfortunate that we got that started right before winter break, but at least we’ll have that structure in place going into the next semester. However, our site coordinator is transferring to a new job, which is a huge blow, because she was one of our best and most helpful supports at the school.
Anyway, I’ve made progress with my students, but still am not where I’d like to be at in terms of effectively pushing them to do better academically. I’ll probably do a self-evaluation over winter break, and come up with ideas on how to improve my approach to things.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the question of how to motivate my students to take school seriously. I was never an especially motivated student, maybe because there weren’t really significant consequences for my poor performance, parental or otherwise.
I did, however, take pride in my ability to speed-read advanced books and learn things from them. I liked feeling smarter than my classmates, even if my grades told a different story. That, and my high test scores, pretty much got me through K-12. It’s not exactly a model my students can (or should) emulate though. Ideally, I’d still like to instill that desire to acquire new knowledge, while also getting them to understand the necessity of doing their work consistently.
