To Learn To Love To Learn

Tonight, I ran into the dusk. Around me, the gloaming gathered itself about pear blossoms looming delicately out of the evening. I hadn’t had time to run in a whole week, and as I ran, I tried to make sense of the motivation that drives me out of the comfort of my books into the pastel evening. I’m training for my second half marathon, but I run for something else, for some principle that I hold tight to my chest and just as suddenly release to chase after powerfully. A thought that motivation is a mere will-o-the wisp we seek to capture sends me laughing as I sprint after it. I ponder the chimerical nature of my students' motivation. Can I capture it for them? Or is that, by the very nature of the quest, impossible? 

This past quarter has breezed by. Our classes are delightfully curious, passionately opinionated, and sometimes downright silly. Today one of my freshmen told me, as we discussed possible college destinations for him: “I can’t go to Clemson. I’m allergic to South Carolina. I break out in tickets.” Since he doesn’t yet have a driver’s license, this is fairly predictable. I think he’ll get over it by senior year. But I wonder what license I can give him that will drive him to succeed in school, to inspire him beyond mere compliance interrupted by comedy.

Tomorrow we expect showers of midterms with a chance of unit 3 retesting. This whole week has been one of my favorite lessons of the year: I set up stations and give kids their progress reports, and then watch them roll. Do they need to re-loop the concept of validity? That’s station one—take your pick of artistic rendering, problem-solving experimental design, or literacy-and-response GO’s. Do they want to focus on the levels of motivation? Station three, and kahoot.it! No selfies with the i-pads, if you please.

The unfortunate kind of inspiration I tend to come out with
when put on the spot. 

As students review, I call each up to my desk individually, for an end-of-quarter conference. The conversations are thought-provoking. Psychology is many students’ favorite class, for reasons varying from “everybody be like, chill in here” to “I’ve decided I’m majoring in psychology in college.”

An interesting phenomenon happened again and again, until I caught on. Among my slew of questions is, “what would you change about this class? What do more of, or less of?” intended to be followed by, “what will you do differently to improve next quarter?” But students tended to jump straight into that at the first question. My slackers hung their heads sheepishly, saying, “I’d do more of my concept cards,” or, “I’ll spend less time talking with my friends.” Nobody had any suggestions to make about changing the class dynamics—it was all about their own personal actions.

This is my dream. This last quarter that I have, this precious final three months, I want to work on the self-motivation and self-monitoring, the metacognitive awareness, from which sprouts success. My students, as my TFA coach has pointed out, are highly invested in me. But important as relationship-building is, if this is all that I have done, I am a failure. Next year I’ll be an ocean away from them, and I have three months to learn the real task of teaching: to inspire my students to learn to love to learn.