CCHS 03-31

This morning, I was in Mrs. Johns' class as usual. The students were working on what Mrs. Johns was calling a "lap book" and the students were filling their lap books with their work from the previous week. They had been learning about the Pythagorean theorem in math, and Mrs. Johns was able to translate that into some English assignments. For example, the students had to write out definitions of term and then complete a journal assignment. For the journal, students were presented with a few prompts like "When I encounter a math problem I don't know how to solve, I..." and "One of my best experiences in math class was..." Each student was instructed to write five sentences per prompt for a total of four journal entries.

While the students were working on this, Mrs. Johns and I walked around the room to offer help and to encourage students to get their work done. While all of the students did finish their work, it was slow going and I had to quickly learn some ways to motivate students to get things done.

One student simply did not seem to have any motivation to work. She was spending a lot of time on her phone and very little time working on her assignment. In order attempt to get things moving, I tested a strategy on her. I wrote out all of the things that she had to get done before the end of class, such as "complete last journal" and "create a title page." I placed this list at her desk in an attempt to show her that one by one, she could get these things done. This strategy was very helpful for her because she could see exactly what needed to get done and could mark off things she completed, thus giving her a visual of her progress. By looking at the paper and seeing all she had already done, completing the next task did not seem as daunting.

While this strategy did work for that particular student, it was not effective with everyone. A few students were not willing to work no matter what I did, so I simply completed some of the easiest tasks for them, such as taping pages together and cutting out paragraphs. By the time I had completed the simplest things on their lists, they could see that the end was near and then began to work on the last few tasks they needed.

This was a very good day! Even though there were some very frustrating times and working with unmotivated students can wear a teacher down very quickly, seeing students begin to work and get things done was very rewarding. I learned a few good strategies to implement should this ever come up in my own classroom (which I'm sure it will!).