I’ve been really impressed by the insight, depth, and most of all
the intensity of many of the demotivation stories shared so far by
my classmates. They highlight, each in their own way, both profound
and subtle ways in which instructors have wittingly or unwittingly
crushed an individual’s desire to learn or pursue a particular study
further. And I wonder if I have been either particularly luckily or
just suffering a particularly selective memory recall not to be able
to easily identify such events in my own classroom experiences. Not
that I lacked for changes of direction or loss of motivation, but
there are few in which I can so clearly place the blame at an instructor’s
feet.
With that prelude, here is one story that most comes to mind on this topic.
Almost all of my undergraduate physics courses were organized
around regular lectures in which I spent the hour transcribing notes and
derivations into my notebooks as the professor wrote them onto chalkboard
after chalkboard. In most classes this wasn’t particularly de-motivating —
after all it gave a clear incentive to attend the class, as the derivations
were usually explained clearly and not always contained in the text-books.
Many professors worked entirely from memory, some from brief sketchy notes,
but only one that I recall transcribed verbatim from their own notes to
the board. This professor generously provided us with copies of these notes,
in advance of lecture, to save us the tedium of transcribing. Inevitably,
I, like the majority of my classmates, soon stopped attending almost all
of these lectures.
Ironically, I never really read those lecture notes either. This class,
like all the others, had weekly problem sets that we were strongly
encouraged to work through in groups, coming to the assigned problem
session run by a TA for between 3 and 12 hours one evening each week. I
(and the majority of my classmates) attended these without fail, and no
doubt it was these sessions more than what I did or did not absorb in
lectures that contributed to my eventual grasp of the material. As such,
my lack of motivation to attend the lectures didn’t really impact my
interest in the subject, or lead me to the realization that I might
do just as well not attending other lectures and focus my learning on
the group sessions.
What could the instructor have done differently?
Given my own rather naive approach to the situation, had the instructor
simply not provided us with his own copy of the lecture notes, my
attendance record might have been different. Yet this hardly seems like
the appropriate solution. Perhaps this approach simply catered to
different learning preferences — students who would rather read the
notes, rather hear the notes presented, or, like me, simply work on
the problem sets. Though I understand the argument for discrete
visual/auditory/kinesthetic learning styles to be largely debunked,
I don’t think this professor could be accused of doing anything less
effective or motivating than other courses in the department.