General Observations

As I’ve re-read the different posts that I’ve written so far, I hope that I haven’t painted a negative picture of the students at YHS. To be truthful, my time with the students has been wonderful (especially the students in Mrs. Porter’s class because I work with them everyday). It is very interesting working with students in the 9th grade. As someone who gets to observe the classroom, I get to see the learning process unfold right before my eyes. Being interested in education, I am fascinated by watching the way these students are molded and assimilate new information. I truly feel that all of the students at YHS have the potential to go to college. By saying this, I mean that the students all have the mental capacity to learn enough information to achieve good grades and do well enough on the SAT/ACT to be accepted to a four-year University.

While possessing this potential or capacity to learn, I also see that the students are distracted from learning by a variety of things. The students seem to not understand how their actions now will affect their futures. Honestly, as a 14 year old, I don’t think I understood how my actions would affect my future. In school, I always did my best simply because I did not see a reason to do anything else. My parents never had to encourage me to work hard or threaten me with punishments. I’ve just always been interested in learning and being the best in school. Thus, it is very difficult for me to understand students who don’t express a similar sort of motivation. I am not sure whose responsibility to provide a motivating source for those students who aren’t intrinsically motivated. My guess would be that this is the responsibility of parents.

In my mind, the largest problem facing students today is a lack of motivation. If we can find someway to make a student’s education seem important to them, then I am confident that as once a student reaches a certain level of maturity they will begin to proactively educate themselves with the assistance of teachers. I liken this to the phenomenon of sports. Our youth see basketball, football and baseball on television everyday. At a very early age, most understand by practicing more, or attending sports camps they will improve their athletic abilities. Most importantly, they make the correlation between what they are doing now and how if could potentially affect their lives 5 to 10 years later. Thus, they work diligently now to achieve a goal that won’t be within their grasp for another decade.

Somehow, we have to find a way to help non-motivated students understand why education is important and how decisions made in middle and high school will affect their lives in the future.