Response to Another's Blog

I would like to respond to Dan's blog from March 9, "Why are American students lacking motivation?" I have a terribly cyncial response to this question: they lack motivation because they can. For the most part, even the most mediocre of students will have a moderate level of success in this country. The laziest of the lazy will still get their flatscreen televisions, their new clothes every season, and vast amounts of food to fill their ever-expanding bellies. If one doesn't get great grades and doesn't go to college, they will still likely find happiness in their lives. The same cannot be said for many other nations in the world. People in impoverished countries would kill for all of the comforts we have, for the chance to read books, and eat three meals a day plus snacks. We take it all for granted, or at least the newest generation does. I've narrowly escaped this Generation Y mentality (having been born in the 70s and not the 80s or 90s), but I see it everyday.

So, who is at fault here? Is it the parents? The school systems? The students themselves? The latter is not possible, so it is a combination of the first two--parents and schools. The kids in my classes are extremely coddled. We don't like for them to have bad grades, we don't assign enough homework because of all of their "activities," they don't receive enough punishment for their juvenile behavior. They swear in front of us. I would never in a million years have thought it was alright to use the "f" word in front of a teacher or another adult. We had midterm exams last week. They knew they were coming. What are you supposed to do on a test day? Eat a good breakfast and bring a pencil. I ran out of pencils because 1/2 of my students didn't bring one because they expected we would all give them one. I should have let them try to take the test without one, but if I had, then I'm cruel, the student would have failed, and the parents would have called. I often wish I were a teacher instead in the post-WW2 era when parents were tougher and the schools could get away with being more strict. Somewhere along the line there was a split from this attitude. Is it the baby boom children reacting against the way they were raised and feeling a need to show their kids more "love and affection"? How do we get back there? I had a bittersweet kind of a laugh recently. I ordered the "2 million minutes" video to show my students, and when it came I looked at the cover. On the top is a classroom of Indian children, sitting in their uniforms in neat rows with hands crossed in front of them. If you flip it over, it looks like MTV party time students haphazardly sitting in their seats. It made me laugh, and then made me sad. How can we bring back the motivation that exists outside of our country? I'm going to make it my goal to find out.