This Book Will Not Be on the Test by Paul Smith Rivas

Author:Paul Smith Rivas [Rivas, Paul Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Unmotivated Kids

Going to college unmotivated to learn is like going to an expensive rehab facility unmotivated to get sober—no fun and a total waste of money.

For the unmotivated student, academic life feels like a waste of time. Just as for the unmotivated grown-up, life itself can feel like a waste of time.

Fortunately, the line between the motivated and the unmotivated is no different from the line between sunlight and shade. One side is bright and the other is dark, but there is no actual boundary between the two. There’s no fence to prevent the squirrel hanging out in the shade from stepping into the sunlight. There’s nothing to prevent unmotivated students from becoming motivated, either, because motivation is only a matter of seeing things in a different light.

There’s really no such thing as an unmotivated student, only students who haven’t yet realized what they are motivated to do, or how they can harness their motivation and achieve academic self-preservation as a convenient by-product of living a more rewarding life for whatever reasons they deem worthwhile. There are many valid motivations for academic success, and they range all the way from spite to wanting to save the world.

Any kid who can think of something they’d rather do than homework will love learning study skills. Earning better grades in less time is motivating because it affords students more time to do cool stuff.

For high-achieving STEM students, that thing they might rather be doing is groundbreaking research at ten times the brainpower that their high school curriculum requires to get straight As. For athletes, it’s getting whatever GPA they need to meet their future goals as quickly as possible so that they can go eat, sleep, and work on their game. And for students whose grades just don’t reflect how cool and smart they are, it’s developing their cool and smart selves in their real lives, outside school.

Motivating unmotivated students is as simple as helping them discover opportunities to apply their rich set of real-life skills to the contrived academic gauntlet of high school. The best part is that real life lasts a lot longer than school, so the benefits of study skills never expire. The same skills that allow kids to spend more time acting, coding, Live Action Role Playing, making music, selling widgets, working out, writing, or whatever else will also make them better in their career and creative ventures.

Motivation is a matter of perspective, not soul. Finding motivation requires knowing where to look, not looking for something that’s not there. It’s a question of arranging and rearranging your many interests until you find the combination that best aligns with what your school is asking you to do, which is satisfying. It’s not about forcing yourself to become something you’re not in order to satisfy arcane requirements or mediocre teachers, which is unpleasant, stifling, and depressing. All students have all the motivation they will ever need, right there inside themselves; they just need help seeing it clearly for what it is.

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