Week 12: The Anecdote to Missing Motivation

This past week my motivation got absorbed somewhere between 1700 texts and online programs. The high school I am currently working at is a pilot school for an online curriculum known as CommonLit. Last term I used some of their reading quizzes, but designed all the other assignments and activities on my own. This term, because the students have an end-of-the-year assessment with the program coming up, we are to use as much of the online curriculum as we can so that the data concerning it is accurate. Also, my mentor teacher is going on maternity leave so she has designed the lesson plans for the rest of the school year. Because I had never used the curriculum before, I thought I would just feel it out by using the lesson plans she created. I added my own touch here and there, but ultimately stuck to the online curriculum. By Friday at lunch, I was over it. I was not motivated to teach the last period of the day and my students groaned as I asked them to login to Commonlit in my previous class periods. 

As I met with my mentor teacher about it, we both realized that I was going about it all wrong. She was designing those lessons as a basic outline, and I was to add in any fun activities or ideas that I wanted. I needed to use the program but in a creative way. After our conversation, I used my lunch time to jazz up the lesson I had been teaching that day. I added an activity analyzing Covid-19 and how it brought about group unity and also impeded individual freedom. I found a video of a broadway singer singing out his window during the pandemic and I turned their group discussion into a 10-minute speed debate. I created all this in 20 minutes. Delivering that lesson was exhilarating and that motivation I had lost found its way back into my classroom. My students felt it. I felt it---nearly immediately.

What was the anecdote to the missing motivation? I believe it was ownership. In teaching, it can be easy to curtail others' ideas. You can just use the lesson plan someone else created or the online curriculum that is easily available. There are so many resources out there that are meant to make your teaching life easier; yet, the trap is not allowing those resources to replace your individual efforts and creations. 

The most satisfying part of teaching is knowing that something you made, something you came up with for the individual needs of your students, is making a difference. Nothing is more satisfying and nothing sparks more energy for you to keep creating. So it seems odd to say that when you are not motivated to do the very thing that requires more energy, but, at least for me, that's the anecdote. When my personality is within my classroom and has bled into the assignments and activities then I am providing a non-duplicable experience for my students. The education they receive when they are with me they cannot receive at any other school in any other way. How exhilarating is that? How motivating is that? Taking back that ownership is the first step to falling in love with what you do, day after day after day. And maybe, just maybe, will get you to stop dragging your feet until Spring Break. 

-Ms. Gee