Learning and Motivation

As a college student, I had a love-hate relationship with final exams. I really liked the idea of having this massive body of knowledge in my head and demonstrating understanding. Trouble was, I usually had some pretty significant gaps in that massive body of knowledge, and that was a bit stressful. Or a lot stressful.

So I can understand why my students get stressed about finals. There is pressure to be competitive for college, there is pressure from home, from coaches, and for some of my students from within. I spend all year trying to teach my students to care about understanding instead of points, and sometimes at finals all of the progress I thought I’d made vanishes.

But at no point do I ever give up on that idea! Seeking understanding is a skill that will serve my kids for the rest of their lives. Seeking points is playing a game that will end as soon as they leave academia. I want my students to motivated by the process of learning rather than the end product of the grade.

Understanding my student’s motivations can be really tricky. As well as I think I know them, I see them in a single context for 90 minutes every other day, and not on weekends. Just yesterday, as a student was doing text corrections, I learned that this boy played the clarinet in jazz band well enough that he had been singled out for awards. In my eyes, this student was bright, goofy, and often forgot to do his homework.

So rather than trying to puzzle out each individual student, I started by looking within myself. When am I motivated? When am I not motivated?

Recently, I attended a Biological Science Initiative (BSI) workshop through CU, where I learned about the microbiome of the gut and its effects on the immune and nervous system, particularly mental health. It was a fascinating look at how the nervous, immune, and digestive systems are all intertwined.

(My science nerd is going to take over for a moment. I promise not to use too much vocabulary, so follow along as you wish!)

There is a whole ecosystem of bacteria living in your gut (and in mine, and everyone else’s) that varies depending on what kinds of food you eat, what kinds of infections you pick up as a kid, and several other factors. Those bacteria help train your immune system, so you don’t overreact to molecules that aren’t actually harmful to you. There is a whole group of cells (called T-regulatory cells) that is responsible for turning the immune system off in non-threatening situations. For example, allergies are an immune response to a molecule (like a peanut molecule or lactose, to name a couple well-known examples) that isn’t actually harmful to your body under normal circumstances.

When your immune system is turned on, there are cells that secrete a messenger chemical called cytokines. Cytokines move throughout your body in your blood, telling the rest of your body that there’s an immune response. This is why sometimes a food allergy can give someone a rash; the cytokines have carried the immune response away from the original site of the molecules. Cytokines can also get into the brain, which makes them pretty special. Not just anything can get into the brain. Scientists aren’t totally sure how cytokines affect neurons at a molecular level, but there is macro-level evidence that an increase of cytokines is linked to mental health disorders like depression and anxiety. Hopefully someday we know how or why cytokines affect mental health, but for now we just know that they do.

It was a full day of listening to lecture, and though I did have a moment at 2:30 in the afternoon where I felt my eyes get scratchy and my mind wander, I loved soaking up that information. But I also thought back to my undergraduate immunology class, and I know I didn’t have the same level of attentiveness or understanding then. So what was the difference? Was it the presenter? The content? The fact that this workshop had no test at the end? The difference in my own maturity? Could it be that the workshop was only one day, and my undergraduate classes were a whole semester? Or that I had an application (my classroom) for the information I was learning?

I think, for myself, this last piece is really important. I knew why I was learning about these three systems and how they’re connected. I was thinking about what I already knew about the immune, nervous, and digestive system. I was thinking about how this directly impacted my own heath. And I was thinking about how I could incorporate all this information into my classroom. So really, I was motivated because I was thinking about lots of things at once, not just one thing at a time. I could see the connections.

Last year when I taught chemistry I got asked “why do I need to know this?” with alarming frequency. The scarier part was that most of the time, I didn’t have a good answer. Let’s take a student named Anthony, for example. (Anthony a composite of three students I had last year and not a real person.) Anthony worked at his dad’s auto-body shop and was already a respected technician. He was seventeen going on eighteen, having already failed chemistry once. He could tell you about engines and oils and things I didn’t understand for hours on end. Anthony did not care what an atom looked like. He did not care about the difference between ionic and covalent bonds. And no matter what I said to him, he never did care about those things. He saw no application to his work at the auto-body shop.

Now, I do not want to open up a debate today about education standards and what we should or should not be teaching students. It’s an important conversation, but it’s also a deep dark rabbit hole. Everyone is biased towards their own content. For me, I think everyone should have a working knowledge of biology. It’s important to understand how to care for our planet and for our bodies. But I’m sure there are also highly successful people in the world who don’t know a lick of biology and don’t care to.

So how do I motivate Anthony to learn about biology (or chemistry, or literature, or anything else)? One thing I talk about a lot with my students is that learning is a process and a skill. That skill is transferable to lots of different parts of life, whether that be in science or history, trying to figure out how to start a business or how to fix a car. Science is about asking the right question and figuring out how to answer it. That’s what I want students to learn.

And, for right now, I’ll lean on the immediacy of finals. I’ve been stealing a line from my mom lately; assessments should be celebrations of understanding. I already have a giant bag of clementines, brownies, and hot chocolate ready to help my students celebrate. And hopefully they will also find learning worth celebrating someday.

And, lest you think I forgot! Your homework: What motivates you to learn? What’s your favorite thing you ever learned (and please don’t limit yourself to a school setting!)? Why is that your favorite?

Hej då,

Jamie