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Show page 14 lessons, Fan 2006 Graduate Writer Motivating You Keeping Yourself Motivated With Your Teaching and Writing BY NATALIE BARFUSS, EDITOR PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH TAYLOR In this issue, we have been pleased to offer you a wide variety of topics relating to motivation ranging from what motivates students, teaching styles that can help motivate, and factors that can reduce motivation. With this article, I want to try to do something that may be received with mixed review: I will attempt to motivate you, the reader. There is so much good done at this university that goes without praise or even acknowledgement. Recently, I was in a graduate computer lab working away at about 10 p.m., not an infrequent occurrence for any involved in academia. I noticed a fellow graduate student slumped at a computer next to me. At a moment between printing and the next project, I asked this student how they were doing, a question asked countless times in any given day. "Fine ..." was the trailing response, followed by a brief description of the current past-due work for their committee. Discouragement was written clearly on this student - dark circles under their eyes, disheveled clothes and hair. For a moment, I tried to stammer some encouragement, the typical "keep at it." But I saw immediately that this was not beneficial to this student, about whom I had heard rumors that they sometimes slept in the cubicle down the hall to avoid the down time of driving back and forth between all-nighters. "You know, you do good work," I said. Finally, a smile. "Thanks," they said with near tear-filled eyes. No one hears it enough, and so, I say it to you: YOU DO GOOD WORK So often in our line of work, and in general, all we hear is criticism. Although most frequently well-intentioned, constructive criticism, it still tears down. It tears down what we're building, what we're dreaming, and what we're hoping. As academics, we're trained to deconstruct. As teachers, we're asked to evaluate and are evaluated. As Americans, we consume everything and everyone, and so we critique it all (Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing). But let me share a quote my dad gave me at a critical moment of particularly low motivation. I have it framed in my office and apartment. It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," April 23, 1910) |
