TPS Reports

The biggest challenge for me as a teacher is to try to find new ways of helping students see the relevance of what we're reading/discussing in class. Over the years, I've found that students tend to "shut down" and lose interest in a given work if they can't see how it connects to their lives. And that makes sense; I think pretty much everyone functions in that general manner. If I'm not interested in something, I generally won't want to devote effort or time to it. If I don't see how a task or assignment will be of use or benefit, I don't want to do it. If for some reason I'm forced to do it, I'll usually do just enough to get by. I'm certain that high school students function the same way; it doesn't matter how informative a lecture is, how dazzling a powerpoint is, or how smart the teacher is if the students can't see relevance of what they're being taught. Relevance and purpose are crucially important because they connect to motivation. Generally speaking, low perceived relevance/benefit = low motivation; high perceived relevance/benefit = high motivation. It doesn't hold true 100% of the time, but I think it does in most cases.

Teachers often complain about students who are "unmotivated" or "lazy" (I know that I have). These students are usually the ones who underperform academically, disrupt class, or do both. Now, I'm certainly no pedagogical expert, but my experiences have taught me that these types of problems usually result from a lack of motivation. If the student were better motivated, he probably would get better grades and disrupt the class less frequently. And increased motivation usually occurs when the student starts to see the importance and applicability of what he is learning. I think that teachers should always remember what it was like to be in high school and have to sit through a class that was boringly irrelevant. I can remember going through that, and it was a terrible experience. I felt like I was wasting my time and wondered why I couldn't be taught something that actually mattered. I just wanted to learn something that was relevant to my life; I'm pretty sure that today's high school students still feel the same way.