Motivation: The Inner Struggle
With Senioritis setting in, motivation and I are not always on speaking terms. Some days I can get up early and get my work done a day beforehand. On other days I can hardly drag myself out of bed and over to UNIV 401 to take a reading quiz that I may or may not be able to answer the questions on. but you’ve heard that all before right? It isn’t new, everyone has days like that. Especially students. I’ll poke around on the internet here to see what others have to say about that but first, here’s my two cents on that. I have been in school for my whole life thus far. Sure most of it was because I had to by law but now I’m in college and I’m here by choice. Even though I’m here by choice, I’m still in school, for over a decade and a half at least, there has been no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of homework, tests, and late night papers. I didn’t get a taste of the life that comes after until I started interning during the summer of my sophomore year here at Greenville. I was making money, sure, but the biggest change was, work stopped when I left the building. That was new. When I got home I could relax. There wasn’t a 1500-word essay due at midnight accompanied by a midterm the following morning. I’m not saying there wasn’t pressure, but the work didn’t follow me home like schoolwork does. Although I’m sure that this isn’t the case everywhere. To put this in less words, I was more motivated at work than I was at school because of the change of scenery and the fact work stopped at 5:00.
But what does the Internet have to say about Students losing motivation? Here is a link form and article by Forbes on the subject and a quote from the aforementioned article;
“Too often, strategies that adults use to boost student achievement — such as raising academic standards and giving high-stakes standardized exams — do not address the real reasons why students are disengaged. Even the most dedicated teachers and parents may be sending messages that leave children believing they don’t have what it takes to succeed.”
This is of course talking about high school but I can role with that. This isn’t a reason why students lack motivation, but from my experiences, this is pretty true. The article goes on to state that not all types of motivation work on all students, something that Deloy was saying about geeks in class. Even the causes of demotivation are different for every person. For example, a solution that I’ve seen everywhere I looked was that students needed more hands on learning. While that would work in areas like science and it would definitely make history more interesting to those who don’t find it so, some people might benefit more from tests, notes and lecture.
What about lack of motivation in the workplace? This is a class about managing after all. Well surprisingly the first result on google might actually not be garbage. The article talks about the causes of a lack of motivation in the work place. On of the ones that stuck out at me was that a lack of job skills, in other words not being ready for a position, can cause loss of motivation. We’ve talked about this before in class, but not from a motivational perspective. To tie this back to the student perspective, I believe I’ve found a factor for motive loss in both the workplace and school in this article. Reading further, the article states that “overwork” can “burn out” and employee even if they’re being paid overtime. The same can be true of students. If I have a whole bunch due all around the same time, I find it very hard to do anything except try to forget how much work I have to do.
