Motivation in the High School Classroom or

Motivation in the High School Classroom Or How to Keep Kids from Vegging Out Perhaps the largest problem in education is the fact that students are not motivated to participate in classroom activities. A large percentage of the problem comes from the fact that there is so much stimulus outside the classroom. When kids go home they play on the internet, play videogames, watch television, listen to the stereo, and talk on the phone. Some kids are active and play sports, ride their bikes, or do skateboard tricks.

Sitting in front of a chalk board while a teacher explains things in a dry and less than engaging manner tends to reinforce the fact that school is boring. Teacher's really cannot compete with a student's outside activities. The activities that a student engages in on her own time is something that she enjoys doing. Most kids feel as if they have been forced to attend school. Most kids feel that doing homework or class work is a chore.

Some teachers would argue that the kids are the ones that need to change; that somehow it's the parents' or the student's fault that the child is not motivated. The reality is that it is the teacher's fault. The teacher must make the class engaging. Indeed the teacher must become an entertainer, she must entertain the students while providing them with a given lesson. A teacher walks into an Language Arts classroom holding a jar with green liquid in it.

Within this green liquid, small black shapes appear to move around as if they are alive. The teacher places the jar on the overhead. A projection of the green liquid and the small black objects appears on the screen. These are sealice, " he says. "They're a serious problem in the river." The students are engaged. One kid raises his hand and the teacher nods to him. "How did they get there?" The teacher responds, "it appears that they grew there. They come out of the sewage. They're alive you know.

Do you see them moving?" The kids look at the screen and the small brown shapes are definitely moving. "They plan on putting a chemical in the water to eliminate the sealice. They hope that after they put this stuff in the water the sealice will all die." The kids are hooked by this story. And they are hooked by the little moving objects.

The teacher goes on to tell the students that they are going to work in small groups to create a pro and con list concerning the elimination of the sealice. While the students do this, the teacher will bring the jar around the classroom for the students to look at what's inside. Of course the jar will be covered while the teacher moves around the classroom to prevent the students from smelling the contaminated water.

At the end of this critical thinking exercise, the students present their pros and cons to the remainder of the class. It is clear that the students have put in a great deal of thought. As they finish their presentation, the teacher pretends the smell the liquid.. Then he drinks it. Students groan loudly at the teacher drinking such a putrid substance. Some even get up and act as if they are going to vomit.

When all is said and done the teacher reveals that the liquid was nothing more than Mountain Dew and raisins. He reveals that the lesson was really about working on critical thinking skills and that there is no such thing as sealice. This same teacher would later do a lesson on urban legends. He presented the students with a great deal of urban legends and the students had the opportunity to write and talk about urban legends that they heard.

Eventually the class was given the task to create a harmless urban legend and to see how fast it would spread throughout the school. Needless to say Vanilla Ice was not going to play homecoming, but the rumor spread like wildfire. Kids were calling each other at home and telling their teachers. Soon enough there was an article in the school newspaper refuting this rumor. The problem with each of the preceding lessons is that the preparation for them is extreme.

In many some cases these lessons may have actually taken hours to prepare.. However, the students were engaged. The students were interested in what was going to happen in class next. The reality is that the average every day teacher will not be able to put together such complex lessons on a day-to-day basis. However, if she can create.