Motivation

On Friday, the 22nd of January, 2010, I was in my AP Government class for the last day of a model congress. The model congress was a great idea and one that worked very well for the first day. By the end of the simulation, however, the students decided they would rather screw with the system than actually try to learn. The result? Bills were passed that included provisions such as every April 23 is now National Korean Appreciation Day, also known as Kimchi Day. Those two weeks of class were not a model of congress. They were a mockery. At least I hope they were, or else I just lost all my faith in congress.

Very often, people bring up the issue of America's lackluster education performance. Efforts to alleviate the problem have been instituted, but they don't address the real cause of the problem. Our students simply don't want to learn. Throw as much money as you'd like at the education system, but if you don't change the attitude toward education, nothing will get done.

When a student goes through school, he or she is constantly bombarded with two conflicting messages: on the one hand, they have the American dream in one form or another, and at some level they understand that education is necessary to achieve this, but on the other hand, doing well in school is simply uncool. So students are essentially presented with a choice: work for a better future or shun school to become popular. It's obvious which one is chosen more, and not unreasonably.

When the issue goes to the government, they don't see this choice. All they see is under-performing students making their county/state/country look bad. They can make a law that requires improvement on standardized tests, but the people in charge of education locally, be it the school level, the county level, or the state level, won't make education better to meet the standards. Instead, they'll lower the standards so that more people can pass without increasing costs at all. Again, this is a rational decision, especially when the result of not meeting standards is punishment rather than help. Instead of improving, they cheat the system.

The same problem is present on a much smaller scale. I know many people who can say that they have what are colloquially known as "Asian Parents". As many of you know, Asian cultures value education highly. Unfortunately, the way that some parents carry this out is by punishing their child for every bad grade that they get. And a bad grade means a B+ (or an A- now, I guess). What do the kids do? They cheat the system. I don't mean that they necessarily cheat, but they get good grades without learning.

I'll do another blog post at some point on what learning is, exactly, but for this entry I want to talk about why students don't want to learn. The answer comes from History of Science. What Mr. Kelly said, and I think that this is very true, is that there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.

There are many reasons why students study for school: they need good grades to get in to college, they need good grades so that they don't get grounded, they need good grades so they don't get hit on the head, et cetera. Of all of those reasons, none of them are intrinsic. And that's the problem.

Think about the things that you do for fun. Do you do them to get in to college? Do you do them because your parents will hit you on the head if you don't? Do you have any reason to suspect that it will help you in the future? It's possible for school to be that way too, but a lot of things need to change.

First, people need to stop taking pride in their senioritis. Yes, your grades mostly don't matter for college now. Yes, you can slack off a little bit. But it's not something to be proud of.

Second, people need to realize that graduation is not the end of life. I'm sick of people telling me that they aren't going to work at math team because "It's too late" or that they don't want to do anything academic because they're "already in college" or have "already submitted [their] application." You aren't stepping off the face of the earth after you get your diploma, so stop acting like it.

Third, people need to stop telling other people to stop trying. Just because you want to be a slacker in your eighth semester of high school doesn't mean everyone does. Unfortunately, most people do. So this change needs to happen in teachers too. Half of the reason that geosystems is a horrible class is that the students don't care. The other half is that the teacher knows the students don't care and facilitates their not caring.

People wonder why our math team isn't doing well. I can answer that, but I'm also powerless to fix it without your help. You also won't like my answer. We aren't doing well because none of you want to do well. The only reason why you're going to competitions is for the prizes.

Why do I say this? Because none of the seniors are coming to math team anymore. They have no intrinsic motivation to do math or math team. They did it because it looks good on college applications. They ran for an officer position not because they wanted to help the team, but because they wanted to buff up their resume. But none of them actually say that straight up. Instead, when I ask a senior why they weren't at math team, they make an excuse.

At PUMaC, I said we had a chance to win HMMT if the team worked. From what I've seen, the team hasn't worked. I will be at HMMT and put in my part, and we will still lose. Chances are I won't be at ARML again. If the math team keeps going how it's been going, then this year will be our worst year yet.

Come on, prove me wrong.