Motivation

I recently did a bit of free writing - you know, when you just sit and write with no aim and purpose in mind - anyway, I thought I would share a snippet of what I wrote:

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So I’m feeling unmotivated at the moment, on top of which I’m tired. I’m not sure whether I am tired because I’m unmotivated or unmotivated because I’m tired; or whether the two are related at all - although I suspect they are.

What happened? When I arrived back in Korea I felt motivated, I was going to work hard, improve my lessons and become a great teacher.

I guess reality poured cold water on these ideas. My reality is that under the conditions that I teach it can prove difficult to remain motivated.

Each lesson I pack thirty plus, often restless, students into my classroom. There’s little room to move once the class is seated, so the majority must remain in their seats for the duration of the lesson.

No matter where I pitch my lessons they are either too difficult or too easy for number of the students.

At this point I fee like I’m rediscovering how low some of the students are. Some of them are at foundation level, they require special attention which in a class room of thirty or more students is not possible. It’s an indictment on the Korean schooling system that these students are pushed from year to year of English education never having grasped the most basic elements of the language. I feel sorry for them, and wonder how they feel when I occasionally misidentify one of their number as a student that is actually keeping up in class.

I want to apologise when this happens. I want to explain that my intention is not to embarrass them. I want to tell them that I do my best to avoid inadvertently embarrassing them, but that it is hard to keep track of 700 boys English abilities when I only see them once every two weeks. I wish I could quietly pull these students aside and apologise but my Korean is too poor, and this is a failing on my part. I would like to ask my Korean colleague to translate, but I doubt they would understand my sentiment and my own pride would probably leave me feeling awkward and unsatisfied.

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So I have been a little unmotivated, but I do have some good news. Some of my higher level students have taken to the idea of writing for me which I am thrilled about. In the last week I have received a range of poems and short pieces.

The vast majority of my students also like the new reward system that I have implemented. The reward system is really simple: I have created two boxes, one for each of my schools, and the students can win 'tickets' in class, which they fill in with some basic information - their name, their class and the date - and then put into the box. At the end of the school year we are going to have a draw, and one student is going to win a voucher. I have also told them that there will be a small prize for the student with the most tickets in each class. I hope the novelty of this new reward system doesn't wear off. I'll hold an interim draw if the students’ interest begins to wane.

I enjoy teaching, it’s both fascinating and complex; and I can understand how people ‘fall into teaching’ and remain teachers for the rest of their lives, but teaching is not something I wish to do indefinitely. Teaching is an adventure for me, but it’s one that has an end in the relatively near future.

One of the challenges of teaching, for me at least, is to remain motivated. My experience, both from growing up and as teacher, is that adolescents, especially boys, can be difficult to motivate and keep interested. Combining adolescents and unmotivated teachers is a recipe for disaster, and not for the teacher - but rather for the students. I can thank a certain Afrikaans teacher who taught me in my final years of schooling for effectively killing my interest in the language. Only now am I beginning to take an interest in Afrikaans once again.

Despite my current apathy I at least recognise how important it is for teachers to remain motivated; and have so far not let my personal lack of motivation affect my classes. I put in as much enthusiasm as ever when teaching.

This is the box that I created for my second school. I had the students decorate the box.