Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Random Lack of Motivation

I'm sitting at a computer trying to come up with a powerpoint for my physical science class tomorrow.  It is over earth science stuff so it should theoretically be easier than making pie, or cinnamon rolls in my case as pie is ridiculously easy for me these days.  I have less than no motivation to actually do it though.  It doesn't help that my class refuses to do anything I say and I'm quite sick of putting energy that I simply don't have into them.  For example, I told them the first day that they would have homework assignments that they needed to do.  I would not collect the homework assignments, but there would be quizzes and all quizzes would be direct homework problems.  Plus if they had done the homework, they could have the homework out while they took the quiz and USE their homework to help them on the quiz.  I have 2 of my 20 students who have caught on.  They regularly get 85% or above, while the rest don't even get 10%.  The "rest" are also curious about how to improve their grades in my class.  We have 5 class meetings left and they are just now wondering what to do to improve their grades?  One of the girls who regularly does the homework has actually started asking her classmates why they don't do it since they keep failing the quizzes.  You know it is bad when the students are asking other students why they are being stupid. 

The other really hard thing about coming up with this presentation is that approximately 1/3rd of the students have had or are taking earth science with me.  We spend three weeks in Earth Science talking about rocks, so spending any time at all with rocks in physical science seems like a complete waste of time to me.  They didn't learn the material in the three weeks that we spent on the material in Earth Science so why would I expect them to learn the material in the one day physical science stuff?   I suppose I'm just super cynical right now, but this really isn't rocket science. 

Anyway, I should go start because I know that the quicker I get started the sooner I'll be done.  Maybe I'll be done and go to my small group tonight.  This might be some motivation if I felt some deep connection with them, but I'm quite disappointed as of late because I don't really.  We've been meeting as a small group for a bit over a year now and neither Chris nor I really feel "more connected" to them.  We'll see where this leads, but it doesn't help my motivation to only go to sleep and forget to do anything else.  I'm almost curious what my physical science class would do if I turned up tomorrow and simply told them that I forgot to prepare anything for class. 

Well, off to start banging my head against a wall to see which is actually a harder substance. 

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