Guide for motivating teachers (II)

* Excerpt from my book - Motivation for teaching career, Bucharest University Publishing House, 2010 (see entire book in the right column of site)

Exercise 5

What do I need to be more motivated?

Some things are obvious and there can be said that each of us knows very well the things necessary to feel motivated. Generally that is true but this thing happens only at the level of fundamental motives. But your motivation profile is far from being made up only by two-three aspects. We are rather talking about a complex network of elements; the main ones are more difficult to be dealt with because their position in the conscious zone proves the fact that even if you knew what leads in a decrease in your motivation, you have not had the opportunity so far to overcome this state of the art.

In return, the less obvious reasons, which were unconscious as such, have more chances to be solved. Think about the following analogy: the case of shareholders’ general meeting in a firm. You want to convince the meeting, but you have few chances to do so at the level of the main shareholders. However, the “small” shareholders, with little power by themselves can influence the balance of votes for your proposal if they are individually convinced. In the same way, even if the main motivators cannot be solved there is still a chance to support your motivation by listing a more extended enumeration of attractive elements for the teacher career. 

10 things that motivate me to be a teacher:

Digital childhood today, online family tomorrow?

When talking to parents and teachers, a serious issue comes forth more and more often: both parents and teachers display increased problems in understanding children/students and many of them experience an acute feeling of helplessness when confronted with situations that seem inextricable. The little ones seem to be building their own world, inaccessible to their parents and educators and thus the gap between generations becomes deeper and deeper.

An important factor of this change is the Internet. To children that are born in a digital world everything seems natural, but grown-ups (parents and teachers) don't perceive this problem in the same way. In 2001, Mark Prensky coined a major distinction: he talked about digital natives (those who were born or are born with their fingers on the keyboard and who are native speakers of this digital language of computers, video games and the Internet) and digital immigrants. The latter ones, although manage somehow to adapt to this new world, are very similar to geographical immigrants: even if they learn a new language, they always retain their accent and they can never be as fluent as the children born there. More than that, some specialists have even talked about digital aliens (those who never manage to assimilate the language of the digital world).

What happens when children are natives and their parents are immigrants? They don't speak the same language and children have a different perception of the world, they disown their parents' authority (and the authority of many other institutions, including school)! The explanation is simple: the Internet provides an extensive freedom to its user, or at least much more than a parent or an educator could provide. Bugeja (apud Selwyn, 2009) notes that all these could lead to a culture of disrespect between young people and formal institutions (including family and school).