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Teacher and Student Motivation

Akanuma Ryosuke (Numazu National College of Technology)

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet." These are the words of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. I completely agree with him.

Today I would like to tell you my opinion about education. I think teachers can't make students understand something, they can only make them want to understand it. But you know it's very hard to make students interested in studying.

Please imagine you are in a class room and I am the teacher. I would say, "This is a pencil. It is usually used to write a word or draw a picture. We can divide a pencil into two parts, the core and the casing. Most pencil cores are made of graphite mixed with a clay binder. Blah blah blah…"

Does it sound like an exciting lesson? I don't think so. It's not interesting because the teacher is only telling the facts and we can't imagine the benefits for remembering those facts. So, students get sleepy during lessons.

Now what if I say, "Do you know what this is? …Yes, it's a pencil. I think most of you are thinking that a pencil is boring. But maybe that's not true. Did you know that many people prefer to use type B pencils because the core is softer, thus making it easier to write? Or that elderly people sometimes have trouble holding pencils because their hands are frail? If someone could invent a way for them to hold it easier, they could probably make a fortune. So, let's study about pencils!"

What do you think? I think it's a lot more interesting than the first example. This time I told the benefits of studying about pencil. And there is one more important point; the teacher is interested in pencils and enjoys teaching about them.

Let me tell you how I reached this opinion. I have been studying at Numazu Kosen for nearly 5years. I took many classes. Some of them got me really interested because I had good teachers. The most interesting class I had was "Mechanical Vibration". In this class I learned how to analyze vibrations. My teacher told me "If you can understand everything I'm going to teach you in this class, you will be able to solve most physics problems. And you will also be able to imagine physical phenomenon easily." When I heard that, I thought "I must listen carefully to what this teacher says".

In this class most of the time is used to solve physics problems. The first 30 minutes are used to solve sample problems with the teacher as he teaches us the skills in detail. In the last 60 minutes we solve problems on our own. My teacher's instructions are so easy to understand that we can solve these problems effortlessly. Some of the problems seemed difficult at first, but after the explanation we would always think, "Why couldn't we solve such easy problems?"

For a long time I thought about difference between interesting and exciting classes, and boring classes. After taking Mechanical Vibration, two things occurred to me. The first is the importance of motivation of both students and teachers. Students must come to class thinking "I really want to learn from this teacher about this subject!" Likewise, teachers must come to class thinking "I want to teach these guys about it!" Most boring classes start without any introduction. The students don't even know why they are there.

The second thing occurred to me is the need to show the benefits of taking the class. The most powerful way of showing the benefits is to make them experience the usefulness of the subject. Exactly like what we did in our Mechanical vibration class.

Finally, let me tell you why I chose to talk about education:

In my school there are many students that hate to study. I was one of them. But I changed this year while studying to prepare for the university entrance exam. I discovered that studying hard gave me a sense of fulfillment. And I thought, "why didn't I realize this earlier." Now I want other students to realize the joys of learning. But I can't explain all that in just seven minutes. What I can do is to suggest how to make a boring class interesting.

I want to finish my speech with the words from another Greek philosopher, Socrates. He said:

"Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of a flame."