Conversations with students

Post 25 of 30 #MTBoS30

I've said it before: Not all "off task" behavior is necessarily off task. Sometimes it leads to learning about math. Sometimes it leads to learning about life.

Yesterday, one of the student piped up with "Mr. So-and-so wants to change eligibility requirements for sports."

This other teacher feels that there is a problem in our school with student motivation. His evidence for this is that students who play sports work hard to stay eligible (which is a C in every class) during the sports season, then they tank it after the sport ends. This is especially apparent at the end of the school year. Eligibility for fall sports is based on this year's 4th quarter grade, but not all students will play fall sports. Convincing the ones that will play is also a challenge.

And he's right! We have a problem with motivation. But I don't think it is exclusive to our students or our school or even our town. I think the overemphasis on getting all students into the best college possible by forcing them to be the best little test takers in the world is creating a generation of disaffected, unmotivated kids. Instead of allowing for individual differences and creating diverse opportunities for post secondary career paths, we are overemphasizing the college ready aspect of career and college readiness. We do this to the point where we are effectively telling students who don't meet the standard (based on their standardized tests) that they are just not trying hard enough and they aren't worthy of any career at all. Our students aren't dumb--they are getting this subliminal message loud and clear!

So we discussed these social and cultural aspects of motivation. We discussed how studies of motivation work and how they are often misinterpreted by the popular press. I pointed out examples of motivation studies that were conducted in India and we talked about how they might not apply to the US.

Then we talked about the mathematical aspect of changing the cutoff grade from a 70% to a 73%. What would the consequences be? What would the unintended consequences be? What affect do we think this might have on the motivation problem? What are some other possible ways we could structure eligibility so that students wouldn't slack off at the end of the year? I also floated the idea of getting rid of grades altogether which completely blew their minds.

In the end, they mostly agreed that changing the grade cutoff might not help the problem and, in fact, might make it worse. They made a lot of great comments, but came up with no real ideas for solving societies problems.

Was this time wasted?