Seek What Motivates, Not What Debilitates

[Editor’s note: Ms. H is the pseudonym for a special education high school teacher in Manhattan who is starting her second year of teaching.]

I know the secret to teaching. I found it over warmed-over Chinese food.

I am a high school special education English teacher in NYC.

In July, I had the opportunity to attend a summer planning institute with a number of newly hired teachers that will start their first year teaching this September.

Having just completed my first year of teaching in June, I found myself in a unique position: I was the veteran of the bunch.

After a morning of seminars, we sat down to lunch.

The seminars were helpful, the new teachers agreed, but beside the concrete ways to teach their discipline, whether it was math, science, English, special education, there was a common thread in their questions. They wanted straightforward advice on how to connect to their students in September. So, they turned to me.

As I answered their questions, I found myself continually coming back to one theme: Seek what motivates, not what debilitates.

The school I teach at educates a high-need population of students from some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. The students bring a host of concerns with them to school: learning disabilities, violence at home and in the neighborhood, jailed siblings and family members, hunger, anger.

These are concerns that get in the way of students’ moods, emotions, actions and attendance. These are not concerns that should get in the way of students’ education. I will be the first to admit that I let these concerns influence my teaching last year.

In teaching a difficult population, it is easy for idealistic new teachers to become overly concerned with what hampers the student, instead of what motivates him/her.

For example, 14 year-old Lila’s father got incarcerated mid-October last year. Her moods went from placid to outrageous. I didn’t drill her when she started failing to turn in assignments.

Then, there was Sam. Sam had dyslexia. It was all-to-tempting for me to exempt him from difficult spelling exercises, due to his disability.

I was expressing my concern in the lunchroom one day, pulling the little metal prongs off my carton of leftover Chinese Lo Mien and shoving it into the microwave. As I was waiting for it to warm, I asked another teacher for advice on Lila. “It’s so sad,” I said, “I just don’t know what to do.”

“My approach is to find out what drives the student. Lots of teachers get into the nitty-gritty lives of their students, but I really make myself let that go in one ear and out the other,” she said. “I find what motivates my students and that’s all I allow myself to focus on. You’d be surprised how students adapt the same attitude.”

I was like the cartoon animal with the light bulb light over my head. “A-ha!” I started to look for what drove my students and apply it to my teaching.

When I shifted from one perspective to the other, I became a more effective teacher and role model for my students.

This approach led me to not make excuses for my students, but to make individualized, realistic end-goals for each student.

The results were drastic. Sam might have dyslexia, but I found he had the desire to be a rap artist and the skills to back the desire. So, we used spelling as a bridge to his dream.

Lila’s father was jailed, as well as much of her family. But, she wanted to be different. She wanted to be the first in her family to go to college. So, we started working on college entrance essays. At the end of the year, both of these students who had been failing, passed the year and shared their writings at a poetry/essay slam with the rest of the student body.

These were the stories I shared with the new teachers at the conference this summer, along with the advice I got over leftover Chinese food.

“FIND OUT WHAT MOTIVATES,” I said. “It will make all the difference in the world in your teaching and in your students’ lives.”

 Print