What can be done in schools to motivate kids to love learning, rather than just get through school?

Great questions! When you get the answers I will watching… It is a sad world out there and there has to be an answer… I think it starts in the home.. if the parents are involved with their kids at home, then the kid will be involved at school.. and you already know an involved parent and family is a fading thing…. Here is to the love of family and eductation… GET INVOLVED WITH YOUR KIDS!!! they will be the ones taking care of our world when we are unable and gone…

Ok, first, think about something that is really on the root of the problem. If I were a teacher, i would ask the student what do they like. the answer would be something like…play video game, play computer game, watching TV, Internet and so on,..

then ask them back, what can you do to get those thing? This kindof Question will make them think..right? another question can be, what do you do when this thing is broken? can you fixed it? then i believe student will start to think that they must do something more than just consuming it. Thus, they can start thinking about become an engineer, or business man who owns a factory to produce those kind of things, or anything else.

So, knowing whatever they like is the primary key. From those thing, you can encourage them to do whatever thing regarding those they like.

If I can back to my school age, I would be more asking myself what do I like, and what I want to learn deeply… Another good idea is to tell the student that everything they love to do, mostly require some money to spend, then you can encourage them to be a business-minded from their school age.

Actually there’s still a lot more for doing this… use other creativities for encouraging student. Those i tell you here is only a small part that one people can find.

that is an excellent question and it is wonderful to know that a teacher still cares! i have had numerous other experiences and none too pleasent! i remember fondly my fifth grade teacher mr. ezickson. no matter how much a kid “hated” school before, he was able to get the best out of almost every student he had without anyone even realizing it at all. what he simply did is turn everything into a game. geography, for example, was a huge, laminated map almost the size of the class room. we played twister with it! and tu ensure that we understood and really remembered where each state was, we were put in teams of three or four and each group played untill one in the group made a mistake. so i would have my left foot in ca, my friend would be in missouri! that def. helped. another example was during science. we wouldn’t just talk about solar energy, we would make solar cookers out of a box lined with aluminum foil and a lil shishkabob skewer with a few cocktail weenies. to teach us about outer space we once build a house using the clear garage tarp and duct tape. a fan blew it all up and we could go through. thats how the “astronauts” lived on their space ships, just without the gravity. there were ten thousand things he did but mostly he just made a game of everything. and he made sure we all participated in the projects. thats what i called “no child left behind”!

Well, first we are stuck with Maxim’s Maxim

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make em drink

Tossing that aside, the first thing you have to realize is there is no one way. So, you have to experiment and find a variety of ways.

You talked about video games, well taking a real tour or a virtual tour of a company that makes them, talking to the various people and having them talk about how things actually happen and what you have to do to make it work can motivate some.

Allowing students to do independent projects (i.e. vocational hobbies) and seeing how to do things is another way.

Integrating real world into dry abstract situations is another way. For example the use of Sine, Cosine, Radius, Radians to find and illuminate pixels on a computer screen to generate a circle can be integrated into a math class, along with using Log e in amortization and interest generating programs. They can see how the stuff actuall works.

I used to sit around and play with that stuff trying to find the relationships between all the trig functions. Sine, Cosine, Tangent, Secant, CoSecant I’d play with the various factors not knowing what I was really doing in order to see what happens and see if I can find a pattern to things. Now, with an instructor who knows how they work and can show them what to do and what to exect they learn how circles, waves, etc. are generated and what affects them.

One of the first things one has to do ask find out what naturally motivates the student. Do they have something like are striving for or like to do that you can then take and use as a tool to integrate into education.

For example, someone who wants to be a writer. An English teacher here can help the student(s) take their work apart and show them how to make it better from the standpoint of a reader which might help them get published. Getting them published then motivates them to move, keep going, continue and become even better.

The problem with PRIMARY and SECONDARY education is they are motivated to one goal. Getting a student up to a minimalist point where they can either go on to COLLEGE, which deals in the real world, or get into the real world with enough math and writing to fill out a job application (and unfortunately many students can’t do that).

Other problems exist, such as the mandated syllabus of the state (if today is Tuesday we are talking about the Mercantile system and nothing but the Mercantile system).

Why just talk about the Mercantile system, put it into practise. Student participation. They learn by doing and the teacher, who knows the process, dictates the rules on the fly and if the student wants to beat the game they have to read ahead and outwit the teacher and other students.

Then education becomes a competive sport.

Another factor is that teachers are ill prepaired. They never, as a rule, went on to grad school and did their own indepdent projects and overcame this stumbling block of indepdent learning. So how can you teach that to kids, when you don’t know it yourself.

A contemporary politics course can encompase a wide range of topics to include geography (most students can’t find South Dakota on a map, now let them find Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey), economics, standard of living, the concepts of secular verses sectarian verses religious government. History of the region. Past wars and conflicts. Things leading up to today.

But this requires someone teaching who can think and do an independent project. And then you get maybe three people to VOULLENTEER to do indepdent studies by the next class on various aspects and see how many total groups of 3s VOULLENTTER and then when they come in see who got all the same informatin and who found something different.

I’m talking about going from dry lectures to roundtable participation.

Putting up a picture of a world with out names and getting the students to put up pieces of that puzzel, tell us about those peices and have input from teacher on aspects they might have missed until you have a whole picture of the world.

Now you integrate history, politics, geography, religiouis views, conflicts, economics into what is going on right now.

Everyone, including the teacher, walks away knowing far more than they did at the start of the semester.

Never label them.Never put limits on them.

Labels–

I’ve seen many teachers point out a child and say ” That one’s no good”. That child can feel that he is disliked. The teachers think he’s bad and that’s discouraging so he’s not gonna even try.

Limits–

Some teacher’s have made the statement , ” If they haven’t learned it by now, they won’t.”

Nobody believes in the kid…..so the kid stops believing in himself.

Let each child PROVE who he is no matter what others say.

Let each child discover what he CAN do despite what we may think he’s capable of.

You have to motive kids in a way that use visual aid like drawings,,actual things to win the kids attention and to retend the topics u discuss.