An Anecdote of Demotivation to Motivation

In grade school math was always my favorite subject, so I had no problem getting motivated about it, and would get depressed if I felt like I was falling behind for some reason, or being held back in my math education by forces beyond my control.  At the beginning tenth grade I was in a trigonometry/pre-calculus class that was going nowhere.  Most of the first quarter of the class was reviewing very basic trig that I already felt comfortable with, and the teacher completely bored and clearly disinterested in teaching the class—obviously a demotivating factor.  I felt like I was falling behind and losing interest myself. I think I still did reasonably well but I didn’t really try very hard.  In the book’s terminology I guess you could say I was somewhere between hopeless and defiant.

After the first quarter, however, I changed schools for mostly unrelated reasons and was placed in a similar class.  My new teacher was actually a former army drill instructor and was very intense and demanding but also enthusiastic. All my fears about falling behind came true too—his class was lightyears ahead of the one I had just come from.  To make matters worse he had a teaching style that completely disagreed with me—he assigned many tasks that felt like onerous busywork. The most important such task was that were required at the beginning of each class to copy his lecture notes verbatim, and he would actually collect our copies of his notes periodically to make sure we were doing it.  If we missed a day of class we were expected to copy the notes from a classmate.  This, combined with the demotivating factor of being so behind to begin with placed me somewhere between defiant and evading: I certainly understood the value of learning the subject matter, but I didn’t want to under the given circumstances, and I certainly didn’t want to do the work he was assigning.

He really was a good teacher though, and very experienced. He recognized the problem with me fairly quickly—I had met with him several times and made clear that I was enthusiastic about math, but not about his teaching methods and that I really needed a change. But while several other people’s posts this week mentioned pedagogical stubbornness as a demotivating factor (and in general I would agree) in this case it won the day.  The teacher gave me copies of all the lecture notes from the classes I missed at the beginning of the year, and had me go through and copy all of them, as well as work through all the homework assignments.  It was grueling work, but he kept at least trying to give me encouragement. By the time I had gotten through everything I felt thoroughly caught up, and rose to the top of the class.  Sure it helped that I already cared about the subject matter, but I suspect it would have worked even for a relatively math-phobic person so long as they have some other motivation, such as grades.

Another Motivating Example

The first midterm in one of my toughest undergrad classes was a disaster—the class average was somewhere in the mid-30s. (If it matters, the course was called Formal Language Theory, though it also included a fair bit of analytic number theory.)  In some ways the class’s failure on that exam was a great motivator for the professor.  Although he knew as well as we did that it was a tough course, he actually had not been expecting that degree of failure. He never told us, as far as I recall, that the class has a high failure rate (just a high attrition rate, though maybe that’s almost as bad).  I was feeling a bit grim about it myself, after that. I’m not sure why I did so poorly—it wasn’t for lack of interest or effort.  I think I just wasn’t used to thinking about those kinds of problems under time pressure.

In the hopes of rectifying the situation, he scheduled a second, previously unscheduled midterm which gave us something sooner than the final to work toward. It was only two or three weeks after the previous one, but in the intervening time he worked with both as a class and individually to figure out how to help us better think about the subject matter. I think that, while somewhat depressing news, it ultimately helped that the professor was honest with the class about how much we sucked—it really motivated me to do better. And having another exam soon after the first one gave a realistic goal to work toward (whereas the final was still too far off to think about).  I aced the remaining exams.  Also, I’m not sure I should admit this, but I found that drinking a couple glasses of whiskey really helped me relax before the exams and think clearly about the problems without getting too jittery.

Online Learning

I don’t have a great deal of experience with online learning—I’ve never participated in a purely online class as a student or as an instructor.  Though I do think my high school math teacher’s approach of having students copy his lecture notes could easily translate to online courses.  For example, if all the notes for a Python class are in IPython notebook format it’s easy for us to give students copies of the notebooks to look at themselves.  But I don’t think they’re going to absorb much of anything from them unless they’re encouraged, if not outright required to type out all the examples themselves, as well as any other notes.  Likewise, with some of my current coursework in physics I’ve found it very helpful to work through the notes and do all the derivations myself to make sure I understood them.

Maybe that’s why one of my favorite free Python books is Learn Python the Hard Way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/).  It also strongly emphasizes manually typing in all the examples, making sure that they run, and understanding why they don’t run if/when you make transcription errors.

I don’t think it’s a very good book for novices, however.  It’s too easy to fall into the trap of just copying the code without thinking about it.  I had an intern this summer who needed to learn Python, and although she had a little bit of programming education at school it was clearly not very sophisticated (she was confused about the difference between Java and Eclipse, I later found out).  Learn Python the Hard Way was the first book I gave her to work through, and I don’t think it did much for her because of this trap.  She also didn’t do any of the “Extra Credit” assignments at the end of each chapter.  I think those assignments should be considered mandatory for ensuring that you actually understand the topic. I should have insisted that she do them and send me the results to check.

This took me about 2 hours between reading, thinking about the topic, and writing up my thoughts.