{"id":777,"date":"2013-07-10T00:57:24","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T00:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=777"},"modified":"2013-07-11T02:56:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-11T02:56:41","slug":"motivating-our-students-chuck-sandy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2013\/07\/10\/motivating-our-students-chuck-sandy\/","title":{"rendered":"Motivating our students – Chuck Sandy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please Stop Talking About Motivation\u00a0<\/strong>— Chuck Sandy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"Chuck<\/a><\/strong><\/h2>\n

When we say someone is unmotivated, what we often mean is they are not doing what we think they should be doing. When we say we ourselves our lacking motivation, what we often mean is \u201cI don\u2019t feel like doing anything today\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t feel very well\u201d or even \u201cI don\u2019t feel like I belong here.\u201d It sounds like depression, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Openly confessing to being unmotivated<\/em> is sometimes a small act of personal rebellion and sometimes a call for help. When it\u2019s a call for help, having to listen to someone talk about motivation will just make things worse.<\/p>\n

Our students don\u2019t usually use words to describe their inner states. They act them out in ways that can look like a lack of motivation but isn\u2019t. When we see someone doing this, we have to stop and say to ourselves, \u201cNo, I am not going to walk over and give a lecture on the importance of being motivated.<\/em>\u201d Yet, sometimes we do what we have just told ourselves we shouldn\u2019t. Why do we do this?<\/p>\n

Often it\u2019s because we mistakenly feel it\u2019s about us.\u00a0 It\u2019s not about us, yet we look at a student acting out and looking openly unmotivated<\/em> and think, \u201cI am not reaching this student, do not know how to reach this student, and the only thing I can think to do is stop this behaviour because it\u2019s a threat.\u201d<\/em> Such thoughts occur to all of us. We\u2019re human.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got a student who worked hard getting me to notice how unmotivated <\/em>he is. Every time he slouched down or pulled out his mobile or indicated he has no book, pen, or paper, he looked at me to see if this would be the moment I walked over and used the voice of authority on him \u2013 the one he\u2019s probably had used on him all his life.<\/p>\n

He acted out. I responded in a normal way. He stopped what he was doing, and then started doing something doubly annoying. I ignored that because it wasn\u2019t bothering anyone except me.\u00a0 Instead I commented on something else and walked away. It was a stand off that lasted until one day he could stand it no longer.<\/p>\n

As I approached his group to talk to another student, he looked up and said in a loud angry voice \u201cI\u2019ve got a headache, alright?<\/em>\u201d I was completely taken aback. He glared at me, repeated this line in an angrier voice, and then waited. I confess, I almost said something different from what I did say, but what I did say was, \u201cI\u2019m sorry to hear that. Why don\u2019t you go to my office and take a nap. The door\u2019s open.\u201d<\/p>\n

He picked up his bag, turned to me, and said, \u201cI\u2019m not stupid, you know.\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cI know that. I didn\u2019t say you are. I said maybe you could use a nap. My office is a great place to take naps.\u201d He stormed off without another word.<\/p>\n

An hour later, he came in, sat down, asked someone what we were doing, and started doing it. At the end of class, when the room was empty he said, \u201cYou have a nice office\u201d and left.\u00a0 That was about a month ago. Since then he\u2019s become what some might call a motivated person. He\u2019s pleasant, brings his materials and participates.<\/p>\n

Why do people act like this and what happened there? I have no idea, but clearly there was much more than a nap involved. Some wall fell down. A new understanding was born between us and something important happened.<\/p>\n

People sometimes work hard at putting up fences to keep others from coming in their inner world and messing things up. I don\u2019t know why people do that, but they do. If you\u2019re going to be a teacher, you have to understand this has nothing to do with motivation and nothing to do with you. Your job is to wait patiently, look for an opening in the fence and when you see it, reach in and say the right thing. A miracle happens when we are able to do this.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as simple and as complex as that. \u00a0—\u00a0\u00a0Chuck Sandy<\/p>\n

Connect with Chuck, Scott, Tamas, Vladimira, Nour, \u00a0Ann and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community.\u00a0Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account<\/a>\u00a0to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our\u00a0English For Teachers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Teacher Development<\/a>\u00a0courses.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please Stop Talking About Motivation\u00a0— Chuck Sandy When we say someone is unmotivated, what we often mean is they are not doing what we think they should be doing. When we say we ourselves our lacking motivation, what we often mean is \u201cI don\u2019t feel like doing anything today\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t feel very well\u201d … Continue reading Motivating our students – Chuck Sandy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-motivating-students","category-summer-sampler-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}