2nd November 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The question of why students are studying something is rarely asked. Students don’t ask it, and teachers and tutors tend not to discuss it much with their students. Probably because school is just something that ‘everyone does’, no one really thinks to explain school to fresh-faced 4 year olds on their first day. For them it’s exciting, intimidating and ultimately brilliant once they’ve made friends, and by then they don’t really care why they’re going to school.
The trouble is that many students start to see schoolwork as onerous as they grow up, and their motivation to work is based almost entirely on not being told off by teachers or parents. Obviously this is a shame, but can you blame them when no one has explained why they’re studying in the first place?
With the government’s new guidelines that students in full time education have to continue retaking their English GCSE and Maths GCSE until they pass, the motivation for trying to pass will become more important than ever. It’s difficult to find a single person in their 20s who won’t laud the importance of English and Maths in their career. It’s not academic. It’s a way to understand the world around us and articulate our own thoughts and feelings.
A great way for a tutor to begin the first lesson with a student is to ask “why are we doing this?” In general, the motivation for doing something is either for the enjoyment of the task, or for the result of what the task will give you once it’s completed. Teenagers will gain patience as they mature, and this might be why adults develop an enjoyment for learning which they didn’t have at school, but a way to motivate teenagers a little more is to try and help them to realise how learning will improve them.
The difficult thing from a tutor’s point of view is that we meet students when the motivation for study probably needed to be discussed a long time ago, and the student is thinking about impending exams and is anxious about all the pressure which really shouldn’t be on someone so young. Interestingly, a ten minute conversation is all it takes to change this, and so many students tell us how their perception of a subject was almost instantly changed when they began tuition.