Blog 7

This chapter is very helpful in preparing to be a teacher. As a teacher it may sometimes be hard to get your students motivated to learn. I know this will be a difficult task for me as I will be teaching high school math. There are many high school students who in general, do not want to be at school, especially in a math class. Learning different ways that I could possibly motivate my students is very helpful. I know that as people grow older, their motivation goes from more of an intrinsic to an extrinsic standpoint overall. Children always seem to want to learn things and grow without anyone telling them to. They are always curious to learn. While older people and teenagers seem to be more extrinsically motivated, always thinking "whats in it for me??" As a successful teacher, you should be able to get your students to be as intrinsically motivated as possible. This could be a very difficult task. I think a good way to do this is to first extrinsically motivate the student by giving them some kind of reward for doing well, so that they will get on the right track. Then sort of ease them off of those rewards to something smaller and smaller to eventually all they are being rewarded with is the actual grade or just the promises that if they do well here they will be rewarded by getting into a good college. For some students this may come easier than others. As a teacher however, you must be careful that you do not make the student reliant on the rewards. If this happens, your plan will have totally backfired and your student may not to a single thing unless there is an immediate reward in it. The idea is to keep a good balance. The job of keeping students motivated is always a hard task and it may take a few years of teaching to get it down just right, but I do believe that if we know the basics that we now know that we will have a lot better chance of helping our students.