In going over my posts to this list, I believe that my most frequent theme involves discussing the minimal amount of motivation shown by many of my students. Because their average motivation is so low, many of my students cannot do the work required to be successful at the college level. My latest post to this list is indicative of this concern. I have come to believe that the primary goal for most of us should be to figure out ways to facilitate an increase in our students' inherent motivation to do the work. Somehow, we have to help our students to become engaged in the course material. My struggle with this has caused me to sound like a scratched record, I imagine. In many of my interactions with others on this campus (and from what I can gather, the same is true on most other college campuses), there seems to be an implicit understanding that most of our students really don't want to be here. For adminstrators, there is an overwhelming concern with keeping students in our courses long enough to get the money allotted for them by the state legislature. For faculty, there is an overwhelming concern with how to get the students involved enough in the course not only to do the required work, but even just to come to class on a regular basis. I have tried all sorts of things in my courses, but I rarely see a change in the performance of students, and never more than a very small change. The relative lack of response to my latest post suggests to me that this has been your experience as well (at least those of you in relatively unselective schools such as mine). I have found that almost all of my students are going to school because they want to get a good job in the future (which, for most, means a job with a large salary). This job orientation is apparent in the fact that most of them have full-time jobs right now, which leaves them little time for schoolwork. If this job orientation motivated them, however, they would find ways to do do the required schoolwork even though their jobs take up a great deal of time. Jennifer Ripley suggested a possible answer to why they aren't motivated to do so: many of them believe that school itself will not help them to get a good job. In other words, they go to school so that they won't look deficient to potential employers, but they don't believe that school itself will give them the skills they need to have an advantage over everyone else. In this case, they believe that school simply puts them at the same starting line as everyone else--they don't believe that it gives them an advantage. The upshot of this belief for them is the following: "why put a lot of effort into something that isn't going to help me much in the long run?" Thus, most of them put in the minimal amount of effort to get passing grades (and often not even this much effort). If an instructor expects you to do too much to get this grade, they seem to reason, then drop the class or switch to a new instructor. On the other hand, for most of us on this list, what we have learned in school, as well as in our continued studies beyond school, has been deeply meaningful to us. We could not imagine living our lives without this learning. Somehow, THIS is what we have to teach our students--that what they are learning in our courses can transform the way they look at their world in a very meaningful and beneficial way. In other words, we need to move them away from this job orientation to school by exciting their deeper concerns about their lives (I am assuming that most have such deep concerns--I consider this to be a valid assumption). One apparent oddity I have noticed over the years is that at least some of my poorly performing students tell me that they have found the class to be very interesting. This interest is the spark that somehow I have to help them use to light a fire. This is what I am struggling with in my posts to you. Jeff Ricker Scottsdale Community College Scottsdale AZ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
