Student Motivation and Interest

I am currently attending college right now while working full time.  I just wrapped up my fall semester courses this last weekend and there were two big points that constantly come up in all of my courses.  These courses were education courses as I am in the process of earning my teaching license. Those two big points were that student motivation and student interest was two major factors that contribute to success in the classroom.  This past week a teacher in my school in an indirect way disregarded the importance of those two things.  Maybe a better way to look at it is that his classroom management and academic achievement suffer as a result of the lack of student motivation and interest.  We have a behavior level system in our school and I take a lot of pride in it.  The reason for my pride in it is that I was a major player in developing the system.  The goal of the system is to promote positive choices by students and in return we, as staff, give them the positive attention that they seek and deserve.  We had a student this week ask a teacher what level on the system he was on and how many points he had lost so far that school day.  These are questions that are not usually timed very well by the students, but are questions we like to see asked because it means the student is bought into our behavior level system.  I will talk more about the behavior level system in a future post.  Anyways, when this student asked this teacher these questions, the response he was given was, "I don't know and I don't care".  This silently angered me.  I am busting my ass in college to be the complete opposite of what this teacher is doing.  In addition, he was making our school and his colleagues look bad.  He was and is a bad representation of what a teacher should stand for.  I take my challenging job as a paraprofessional very serious and I make about a third of what this teacher makes.  My point here is not about money.  Money would be nice, but it is not the driving factor as to why I am in the education field.  The thing that angered me the most is that a student absolutely cannot be motivated to learn or offer suggestions on their interests in an environment such as this filled with disrespect.  It also angers me because I am not the only support staff currently enrolled in college attempting to get a teaching license at my school.  So there are two of us trying to better ourselves and give the students an opportunity at a high quality education.  This leads to another factor to success in the classroom, and that is accountability.  Many people see accountability as a bad thing.  I have written about accountability in a previous blog post before.  The problem here is that the accountability to these actions are still missing.  I don't want anyone to lose their job and have their lives put in jeopardy.  What I am looking for here is for the accountability to take place and have this teacher start doing their part once again.  Like I said, I take my job seriously.  I purposely go above and beyond the requirements of my position to help make our school be as good as it possibly can be.  I am not the only one at the school I work at who puts this type of effort into their positions at the school I work at and I can't express in words how much I respect them because of it.

#teachingrequireseffort