Motivating Students

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

I blame my teacher for not properly teaching me the fundamentals... I know a good teacher when I meet one. My AP Physics teacher is a fantastic teacher, my math teacher is a antithesis. Well I guess she can be a "good" teacher, but that doesn't fit my learning style... In fact I had to correct her on lectures sometimes...

I am more of the "big picture" type of guy, teach me the big picture, I can figure most of the stuff out myself. But try teaching me the nitty gritty stuff like formulas without explaining how they work, it never worked out for me.

Im watching some of the MIT's youtube videos, I love them. They do a great job of teaching me.

Sounds like you are saying two different things here. 1) You want someone to teach your fundamentals. 2) Don't teach "details". To me these are completely at odds with each other.

Correcting a teacher on a lecture doesn't say anything as to the quality of the teacher. Frankly I prefer it when educators make mistakes, it demonstrates common traps and problems everyone has. Not only does it have a positive moral effect on me when I screw up too but it shows how best to recover or identify mistakes. A brief aside about mistakes. I screw up... no, I screw up a LOT. I take a very iterative approach to nearly every problem (this post has already been rewritten 3 times by this point). From failure I learn; Success... not so much. JVN always preaches that design is an iterative process but I think it goes beyond that, life is an iterative process. Never be afraid to screw up and have to rebuild because otherwise you won't accomplish anything of any value.

Relevance, Real World Feedback, Responsibility, and Respect are good things to preach but how do you actually use them? When I have a student ask me why they are not allowed to use the Mill in our shop what should I tell them? The real reason is that I don't feel they can safely use it*. How do I tell a student that without disrespecting them?

So, great article but it raised more questions than it answered for me. What do I have to change in order to make sure that students aren't becoming disillusioned or worn out? How can I more effectively help students follow their passion?




*The students in this case are rookies and as a rule we have never allowed rookies to use either the mills or the lathes. Not just as a safety concern but also because of the fact that they are large and expensive tools that need to be treated with respect and properly maintained and most rookies have not shown that they understand that yet.