Motivation

Everything I've heard about the second year of teaching has been borne out, so far.  Yes, it's almost incomparably easier, in terms of classroom management, time management, lesson planning and all that.  Now that I can actually run a classroom, though, I've got more time and energy to spend fixing the myriad mistakes I made last year.  Chief among those is my failure to challenge my students in their writing, especially as it relates to critical thinking.  This year I'm determined to get every student writing paragraphs with real, arguable theses and well-chosen supporting details.

My kids have impressed me so far with their critical thinking, especially as compared to my Delta students last year.  There's been a glaring exception, though: when we're reading a story, they have a really hard time understanding characters' motives and expressing how they relate to their actions.  

We read a short story, "Charles," that deals with a misbehaving kindergartner and I asked my students whether they thought the kid would keep misbehaving after he was punished by his mom.  I explained that they would need to consider why he was misbehaving to begin with, since a behavior will continue until the reason for it is addressed.  Even with my explanation, most of my students told me that the kid would start acting right "because he got a whupping" or "because he knows he'll get punished if he does it again."

I encountered the same when we read another story, "Thank You, M'am," in which a young purse-snatcher gets smacked around and then fed and cared for by his would-be victim.  When I asked my classes to explain the actions of the two characters in the story, they almost always mentioned only extrinsic factors: the purse-snatcher started respecting the woman because she was nice, not because he started to want her trust.  The characters' intrinsic motives rarely figured into their consideration.

So what to make of this problem?  It strikes me that my kids, 8th-graders struggling to surf the hormonal waves of their adolescence, often don't know the intrinsic reasons for their own behavior.  No surprise, then, that they have trouble getting in the head of characters in a story.  The difficulty in getting them to take responsibility for their own actions is really in that recognition--"I'm doing/I did (blank) because I wanted (blank)."

It's interesting that my students seemed so confident in the power of a good parental beatdown to quell the misbehavior of that unruly kindergartner.  While we were reading "Charles," many students would comment that if they acted like that to their parents, they'd "be through the wall," and I gathered that most of them believed that whupping was the only route to discipline.  If they place such faith in the corrective rod, though, that the only explanation for good behavior is something outside themselves, are they giving up some of their autonomy to change themselves?