The Savior of Motivation

Professionally and personally, I struggle with motivation.

As a teacher, naturally I come across students with a wide range of motivational issues, though some are not necessarily issues. There are the over zealous ones who just cannot seem to get enough work and put very high demands on my already heavy workload. Others seem empty of even a soul, let along a cognizant brain capable of producing more than double word sentences. Of these two evils, of course the former is much easier to accept and handle while the latter... well, the latter seems to take its toll in a rather serious manner.

But, I'll get to that.

Far better are the middle ground students: highly motivated yet able to fend for themselves with the expert (?) direction I give them. They can take my seeds and grow their own mustard plant. The mental soil is rich, and knowledge just seems to grow naturally.

When I began working at my current job, a private language school, I brought with me the assumption that since the students have elected out of all the other options life has to offer to study English at this school, that they would inherently bring with them a high level of motivation and for learning, speaking, and studying the English language.

Indeed, I was sadly mistaken.

Though there are a large number of students who meet my expectations for motivation, a surprisingly large number of students fall into the unmotivated side of things. Why, I always ask myself, do they want to come here if they have no intention of taking my advice or working hard to study on their own. And work hard, they must.

On average, it takes 4-6 years for a fresh non-native English who lives in an English speaking country to become moderately fluent in basic interpersonal communication. It takes considerably longer if that same person were learning English in their home country. In order to reach that 4-6 year mark, that student must spend an incredible amount of time just being with English every single day.

60 or 90 minutes a week just ain't gonna cut it.

And so, I am bombarded with patrons of the school who have been students there for 7-10 years or more yet are still wallowing in the beginner and false beginner zone. I tell them how to improve, yet my words fall on deaf ears. They choose not to work. Eventually, that leads me to stop trying. Their lack of motivation has infected me and now I could care less what they do.

In that professionally lethargic state, I still ask the question; why do those students come in the first place? And maybe, just maybe, I have an answer.

I think that a common reason that people sign up for these kinds of schools is that they believe spending money will force them to see the value of their study. Especially in these economically dark times, they dare not waste a single coin. Their hard earned money will finally be matched with hard work for their hobby. While that may work for a select few, for the most part, it is a lie.

My sister-in-law is an amazing person when it comes to showing appreciation for other people. Whenever we visit her or send her some gift, she always sends us some kind of thank you, either in the form of a short note or a small present. And it comes quickly, too, not four or five months later. She also has a blog she created for family to keep track of her life and new son. She updates it regularly with pictures, video, and running commentary on the growth and development of the child. My own wife, who took more than a year off from work, toyed with the idea of doing that since she "had so much free time." But she never did.

I don't blame her one bit. I myself have serious problems keeping this blog up-to-date. But her inability to do that despite her time off from work brought me to understand the plight of my own students.

She did not have the motivation to do that to begin with. And so, just because she was able to, did not give her the motivation to do that. For my own students, it is very much the same. They had no impetus to study on their own at home before signing up. Their hearts were not directed toward the study of language.

But they wanted it. They wanted to want it.

And so, they come to me, in droves, seeking salvation from their unmotivated lives. They seem to believe that taking my class will magically transform their non-desire to white-hot desire.

It just doesn't work like that.

If you weren't doing it or truly open to it before, no amount of cajoling or advising is going to change those hard hearts.

Go away. Find some tangible motivation within yourself and then come by. You'll be happier, more proficient, and a little richer for having not wasted so much money.

Unless, of course, you just want to spend $100 bucks a month to have tea with me. Then I'll gladly take your dough.

Absolutes

So, I'm sitting with this student of ours that comes in about three times a week and all he does is grammar. His attempts at any real human communication are laughable, if not passable, as his penchant is for understanding the deep mechanics of English grammar. As a self-proclaimed philosopher, he spends hours and hours picking apart the logic of entirely random sentences. In particular, he is fascinated by the use of negation in English.

I have to admit, his fascination gets my juices going at times. Thoughts of college grammar classes flash by and all I can see are endless chalkboards filled with fully diagrammed sentences. I am hypnotized by my own memories. Luckily, when I wake up from my stupor, he's still pouring pages of his work, too into grammar to notice that I was absent for a few moments.

The thing that really gets me is that he - but not only him, lots of people do this too - asks me these questions about the finer workings of English grammar and expects clear cut answers. Even as I rattle off these absolutes about language I can hear the English Powers that Be rustling in their lofty chairs, showering disapproving glances and finger wags my way.

And on some level, I really don't care. At some point, these "opinions" about usage will shift to accommodate new social norms and ideologies. The permanence of grammar is a myth, smoke and lights, something that Usage Nuts death grip because their jobs and their own sense of reality depend on it.

I've told this guy that grammar rules fluctuate and bend over time, so that his minute, nit-picky explanations of rules will only work for a short time. He intends to create a computer program that will automatically modify the grammar of a given sentence in a number of ways.

I only ask, why?

Suggestions

At the suggestion of my wife, I am starting up this blog again. Our sister-in-law has been keeping one about her son, mainly for the grandparents and friends, so this has evidently spurned my wife into a sudden interest in blogs. Okay, maybe not a real interest, but after I told her that I had one she gave me this look like "What ELSE are you keeping from me...?" She suggested I start it up again. So, here I am.

And that's the funny thing about suggestions: lots of people give them, but maybe only about half follow them. As a EFL teacher, I have first hand experience of this. I have suggested and still do continue to suggest a variety of ways in which my students can improve their English proficiency. Living in Japan does not afford many opportunities to naturally use English outside of a classroom, so I would assume that any suggestion I give would be taken to heart.

Alas, I am sadly mistaken.

Out of the 15 or 16 high school to adult EFL students I teach, only four or five have followed my advice, and only one or two do so regularly. My question is, why?

Why, if they are paying about $90 a month to visit my class once a week, do they not invest an equal amount of time outside of class to develop their skills? Why do they come to class with sheepish grins on their faces saying, "No, I did not do any vocabulary study this week?"

It baffles me, but only to a certain point. If I worried too much over it, like I did when I first started working in this English Conversation industry, I would probably drive myself crazy. I have come to the conclusion that many of these older learners are not really pursuing English to fully master the language - it is merely a fun and slightly expensive hobby where they can meet up with similarly aged people to exchange a few words in a foreign language. Research studies I have heard about seem to suggest that learning a foreign language keeps the brain active and stems the oncoming tide of senility. Maybe that is what they are hoping for. If that is the case, then I guess they are at least following SOMEONE'S suggestion, albeit not mine.

No worries, though. They keep coming each week, smiling either because they are happy or because they didn't do any work, but smiling nonetheless. And they pay. And that's the bottom line, I guess. It SHOULD be whether or not they are really gaining anything from their experience in the class but come on... At the end of the day, we all know that money walks, even if my students can't talk.