AUTHOR: Sarah Cove TITLE: Motivation versus Education DATE: 12/12/2006 05:00:00 PM ----- BODY:

So I have started doing research on the educational discourses that permeate the United States today. I went to Amazon.com and put in the word, "education." The first book that came up was "Motivating Students Who Don't Care: Successful Techniques for Educators," written by Allen Mendler And so I read it. My background coming into it was one of cynicism. Will "feel good" techniques really make a difference in education? Isn't that what a lot of teachers are trying to do these days to, what I see, as no apparent improvement? Weren't the teachers that I got the least out of in high school the "feel good" ones? (I want to add that I'm not trying to validate my story here, but just to give the frame from which I was reading the story.) The author's argument is that many teachers find unmotivated students, and as a school psychologist, he has found five categories of techniques to help motivate these students. The categories are: Emphasizing Effort, Creating Hope, Respecting Power, Building Relationships, Expressing Enthusiasm. In "Creating Hope," Mendler has the following techniques:

• Show How Achievement Benefits Their Lives
• Ensure Adequacy of Basic Skills
• Create Challenges That Can Be Mastered
• Acknowledge Your Mistakes
• Help Students Develop Goals
• Help Students Get and Stay Organized
• Show Proof That Mastery Matters
• Focus on Success
• Focus on the Learning Process
• Give Before you Get
• Demand More Than You Really Expect
• Make Homework a Bonus
• Encourage and Support Positive Affirmations

As I read, what bothered me is with motivation as the primary goal of teachers in unmotivated classrooms, where does education happen? Above, Mendler had two distinctions, "Demand More Than You Really Expect" and "Make Homework a Bonus." The first one is that you should set your expectations higher than you really expect so that when the student gets 50%, you can praise them. The second is that homework should be a bonus, an area where students can practice what they learned, but aren't held to doing it. If you do these things, while they might motivate the students, the students won't learn anything. Our standards for unmotivated students are already low, as the recent debate in the US and "No Child Left Behind" shows. If you set the standards lower, then won't our education system just get worse? And homework was a necessary way to learn the subjects I was taught in school. If you want to learn basketball, you practice dribbling and lay-ups; the flute, scales and arpeggios; math, the derivative of 3x³-2x. So if "Motivation" is the top "most relevant" book out there on Education, where's Education?

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