Emotional Involvement in Learning

Before my daughter started first grade at school, I asked her what she wishes for at school. The first thing she hoped for was "that it will be fun for the kids who study." Fun is a major ingredient in a positive attitude. Grown-ups often forget or suppress this self evident truth. A teacher who is fascinated with teaching any material, usually makes it fun to learn.

Another ingredient is the sense that studying something will enable the student to do something useful that they couldn't do without studying. An expected empowerment. It could be a child's ability to gain independence by being able to read on their own, or to count money.

A more sophisticated type of positive motivation comes from the fact that we like to feel we are doing something important (grown-ups are very much into that). We respond to what we see as meaningful and relevant to our lives. An study subject may be deemed important, if it has something to do with buzz on public discussion: I see how my daughter responds to the issue of water shortage, and how she is genuinely interested in knowing about it, and doing something about it. Relevance can be local and specific. For example - acquiring an understanding of statistics at sixth grade, by studying the amount of homework to be expected in seventh grade as it compares to sixth grade - an issue that concerns the students and is perceived by them as very relevant to their life. Meaning and relevance can be in relation to an individual student's interests: It is easy for a child to learn about dinosaurs if they already captured his imagination.

The next set of motivators have to do with acceptance. It starts with praise from parents, teachers and other authority figures. This works well for the younger children, and can be easily provided to the student (ataboy!). The need for praise by superiors can be superseded to some extent with acceptance by peers, aka coolness. Harnessing peer acceptance as a tool to enhance study is a significant issue worthy of a book of its own. At a later stage of emotional development, we can expect a student to develop an internal voice that will give the student a sense of personal achievement of a worthy goal. It can be thought of as Self-Acceptance or a positive Super-Ego. The feeling of personal achievement can be promoted by giving the students some control over what they study, and by allowing them to complete manageable modules of study and gain success experiences.

Bearing in mind that humans are inherently geared towards learning, the fact that learning is often being discussed as a problem, means that powerful forces are working to suppress our tendency to learn. There are many "demotivators" around.

All the opposites to the motivators: Materials perceived as irrelevant - that the teachers don't manage to show the relevance to the students' life. For example, I talked with a well educated person about quadratic equations, and she said she had no idea what it was good for, other than for teaching and testing. It is not that hard to find the relevance. For example, whenever anyone throws a stone, the stone's path in the air is very similar to a parabola - the graph that describes a quadratic equation. But nobody has ever showed her any such example, to bring this aspect of math to life.
Destructive criticism (the opposite of praise) - belittling a child because of difficulty in studying anything, is not very helpful. Lack of coolness: In a group where it is considered uncool to study hard, it is very difficult to maintain the motivation to study.
Lack of success experiences - study material stretches from the beginning of the year to the end of the year without stopping to celebrate the completion of any subject. Having done a test, and feeling the relief of never having to think about the matter again - is nice, but not a good substitute to a sense of achievement.

Missing layers of understanding: Often the material being taught contains layers being built on one another. Especially in math, those layers tend to be stacked very high. As an oversimplified example: to understand addition, one needs to understand counting; to understand multiplication, one needs to understand addition; to understand powers, one needs to understand multiplication. Now suppose a student missed something about the concept of addition - maybe that of adding fractions. When the class studies multiplication, that student is in trouble; when the class studies powers, that student is lost. The problem is so acute in mathematics, that many ex-students maintain a deep fear of math.

Oppression: Too many rules without good reasons; too much work; a sense of the school system serving itself rather than the students; lack of power for the students to decide anything about what and how they learn. A feeling that the officials - teachers and others - don't respect the student. These and similar attributes of a school create a need to detach from studying in order to maintain a good relationship with the self.

Damaging messages from well meaning parents and teachers:

• "I always hated math" - The child of a parent with math anxiety is likely to hear a lot about how terrible math is. Not very helpful
• "This will (or won't) be on the test" - The test is the goal; knowing the material or acquiring the skill is not important on its own
• “If you finish in time, you get to play” - “play” is the reward, not a job well done, not the opportunity to do more, not the thanks of society
• unspoken displays of boredom - I can still visualize a history teacher who would almost fall asleep while droning the lesson. If he was that bored with the material, how could I suspect it is interesting? (15 years later I found out it was fascinating)

Backfiring of unsuccessful attempts to motivate:
False empowerment: Often, teachers explain that the reason to study this or that is that it is necessary for everyday adult life. This works for language and for basic math, but the students quickly learns (!) that for history, literature, civics, gym, etc. - it is not exactly the case. You can't fool all the pupils all the time, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

False praise: Too much free praise has an inflationary effect - it doesn't mean much after a while.

False fun, false claims of relevance and importance, all can create a sense for the students that school in general is concerned not with real life, but with fake life, and that it is not worth an effort. All too often, this sense is justified.

The good news are as old as humanity: We love to learn; Apparently, more than any animal, we are designed to learn. We are hard-wired to be emotionally engaged in learning and to enjoy it. We should just find ways not to mess it up.