Students are the President/CEO of their lives. Being students is their job. Students need to take responsibility for their performance. Period.
I’m tired of everyone getting thrown under the bus when students aren’t happy; especially when they are the ones driving the bus.
Our kids think that it’s a teacher’s job to make all learning exciting. If they think a teacher hasn’t lived up to their responsibility, why should the student?
That is a frightening mentality because it has created a generation of consumer learners. Many students don’t see education as a privilege. They see it as a product. And if they don’t like the salesperson, if they aren’t impressed with how it’s packaged, they aren’t buying.
Any discussion about the problems in American education – and what is to blame for these problems – will likely include one or all of the usual suspects: inadequate and unequal funding, a lack of resources, underpaid and overworked teachers, over-testing, poverty and oppressive legislation.
We all know that all of these things have negatively impacted our schools. All of these things are problems. But where is student blame?
The greatest problem plaguing many of our classrooms and jeopardizing the future of our children, yet rarely addressed – is apathy. In classrooms all over the country, it seems the teachers care more about their students’ grades, learning and futures than they do.
Teachers are expected to combat apathy by continually finding new and innovative ways to reach students with whatever it takes. To ensure student engagement and skill acquisition, we’re forced to teach to the individual learning styles, interests and abilities of each of our students.
If a student can’t learn the way we teach, we must teach the way he learns – times infinity wrong! – life just doesn’t work that way. Sadly, all the attempts to dazzle and awe eventually wear some great teachers down. They burn out. They leave a profession they are good at and once felt called to.
However, the real danger is that this way of thinking has shifted the responsibility of learning, and of caring about learning, from the student to the teacher. Because it isn’t just administrators and parents who believe that it is a teacher’s job to make learning fun. Kids believe it, too.
As a result we have a generation of students who think that if a lesson or an assignment or a class is not interesting, if it isn’t engaging and fun and inspiring, then it simply isn’t worth caring about. They are not obligated to care about it.
But our kids have to learn to be self-motivated because at some point in every person’s life, either at school or in a job or in a marriage, he or she will have to step up and say, “This is hard. This is boring. I don’t want to do this. But I’m doing it anyway. And I’ll do my best.”
The national conversation about education has to stop being so soft. This doesn’t mean that educators should stop trying to improve instruction, but it does mean students must stop complaining and ensure their own learning.
Self-motivation should be the new educational buzzword — every bit as prevalent and powerful as any we’ve seen shape our classrooms in the last few decades.
In the meantime, teachers and parents need practical strategies for encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning.
Unfortunately in a consumer-oriented educational system, words such as habit and discipline have all but gone by the wayside. We emphasize concepts like differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning and data-driven instruction over student responsibilities like organization, perseverance and hard work.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Marketing. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or via email ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
