I had a hard time coming up with a demotivation story for this week’s assignment and I’ve tried to figure out why. Partly, I think it’s because my usual approach to life is never to expect much so as to avoid being disappointed but rather be pleasantly surprised every time something turns out better than I had expected (which wasn’t much). Call it pessimism, but so far it worked 
The other reason is that I probably unconsciously tend to forget negative memories and concentrate on positive experiences instead. Which must be some sort of ostrich syndrome for which I will doubtlessly pay dearly at some point in my life, but there it is (see the pessimistic bend here again?).
Anyway. Here’s an episode I remember that had enough effect on me that I haven’t forgotten it entirely, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it demotivated me. It was back in high school. French was amongst the subjects I was rather good at and got consistently good grades, which is something pretty useful when you need those grades to compensate other less successful curriculum areas. But then halfway through the school year I started getting lower marks, even though I felt I was still working as hard as before on my essays and wasn’t receiving any particularly bad feedback from the teacher. So I asked him what was going on and he said that my work was still excellent, but that he felt I had “peaked” and stopped improving. Anyone else returning such essays would have got a high mark, but coming from me, he felt they were “unworthy of my potential”. Needless to say, I though this was rather unfair. I was still working hard for those essays. Just because someone is good at something doesn’t mean they don’t work as hard as anyone else on the subject. I told him that I disagreed and felt it was unfair. He actually agreed that it was and bumped that particular grade to make me feel better, but after that, things were different. I still worked hard on my essays (and got OK to good grades — apparently the feedback had worked) but I did not enjoy writing them as much as I had before and have been wary of investing a lot of work in something if I’m not sure that the result is going to be fairly assessed.
What else could I have done?
Probably not much. I was probably right about giving him feedback, and it seemed to have worked in the short term, but the issue was left unresolved: I lost a bit of confidence in this particular teacher and he probably did not change his grading habits. Maybe I should have explained better why I felt this was being unfair and told him outright that I was not just complaining because I wanted a better grade.
What else could my teacher have done?
He solved the short-term issue by giving me a better grade, but this did not resolve the unfairness issue. What about other students? A better solution might have been to explain the situation to the whole class (without singling me out), and ask for feedback as to what we, as a group, thought fair.
Why am I sharing this?
This story did not affect my motivation for studying in the long run, if anything it taught me a lesson about the world not being always fair (newsflash). I have good memories from high school and from that particular teacher. The reason I’m sharing it here is because a very similar thing happened to a person that is very close to me, not at high school, but at a postgraduate level. They got told by their professor that their exam was much better than that of the average student, but somehow “unworthy of their potential”. “Anybody else returning that essay would have got a 6 (full marks), but since it’s coming from you, it’s only worth a 5.”
In the grand scheme of things, a 5/6 is still a good grade. But that person has since lost faith in all attempts at fairness in academia and frequently cites that story as an example of something that demotivated them. The same behaviour had profound effects on the self-esteem of an otherwise very talented academic. And this is more worrisome.