Demotivation

Oct 21, 2014 • François Michonneau

I never had a problem with math. Not all my teachers were fantastic, but it always seemed logical and intuitive to me. I haven’t always had perfect grades but I was always closer to the top of the class rather than at the bottom. All of that changed after high school.

In France, some high school students don’t go straight to university after high school, but instead go through two years of intensive coursework that prepare them to enter a national competition to be admitted to engineering schools. This is what I did but only completed the first year. My weekly schedule included 35+ hours of classes, 2 oral exams in the evenings, and one 4-hour written exam on Saturday mornings.

In addition of the extensive training in sciences that comes with this intensive course work, students are also exposed to a competitive environment that reflects what they will go through during the national competition. One way of doing this was for teachers to hand back tests in decreasing order. When the math teacher handed back the results of the first test of the year, I was getting livid as the pile was getting smaller and smaller. He handed me the last one. It was the first time of my life where I ended up last at something I thought I was good at.

In the weeks following this test, I worked hard, reviewed the lectures many times, redid all the exercises we had gone through, I felt that I understood all the concepts and knew how to apply them. I felt prepared when the second test came around. But I didn’t do much better than for the first test. That’s at that point that I felt the demotivation. Why would I spend so much of my time preparing for a test and couldn’t be rewarded for my efforts with a good grade? In the past that strategy had worked.

What could have be done differently?

The teacher could have offered to help. However, in the competitive environment of these schools it was not something that most teachers would do.

I could have been more proactive. I could have gone to the teacher and asked for help. Maybe he could have provided me with advice or exercises that would have helped my understanding of the lessons. But I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t because the teacher seemed hard to reach, because I thought I could fix the problem myself with hard work, because in the end I wasn’t that motivated to become good at math (after all I was there mostly for the biology), because it made me think that I wasn’t smart enough to perform well. I also lacked perspective and was too immature to realize all that at the time.