Recently, I've been losing pretty much ALL motivation to do any schoolwork. The only thing that forces me to do it is the grade I will receive on it, but anything short of that, and I just canNOT get myself to do any work. It's not because it's too much work; I guess it's because the type of learning you do in school isn't really education to me.
For example, say I had an easy supply/demand worksheet to do for my Economics class that would help me learn supply/demand,and I know nothing about supply/demand. Why would I want to do it now? I’m not going to need it anytime soon; the only reason I would is because my teacher is going to grade it. And it’s such an easy concept that I can just learn it when I need to know it, not learn it preemptively.
This is true because the concept that the worksheet teaches me is so easy, that it is boring. My time should be saved for 1) Hard things and 2) Things I need to do. Learning a simple concept is neither. I gain nothing from learning it, besides the knowledge--knowledge which is useless to me for now.
I.e. "Why should I do the work to learn it now when I can easily do it later in life when I actually need to know it?"
What SHOULD describe my schoolwork is “This is complicated, hard work, and I won’t have time to do it later in life to learn what I need to know, so I will learn it now.” E.g. Programming languages. I am completely willing to do the work now to learn a new programming language that I might need later in life because I won’t have the weeks needed to learn it when the necessity comes up.
But a simple concept like supply/demand can be learned in minutes, and there’s no need for me to do work, however miniscule, to learn it now. When I need it later, I can just teach it to myself in minutes. I don’t need a teacher to specifically assign it to me.
I know this is a very badly described idea, so let’s visit the programming language example again. Say my CS teacher were to assign me a graded assignment on using parentheses. I would be furious and demotivated; such a simple concept does not require a specific assignment to be learnt. What my teacher SHOULD do is assign me a whole programming language to learn. That would take me weeks to master, and in the process, I would learn parentheses when I actually need it—and I would be fully motivated by the need to do so! Learning a programming language wouldn’t need any further motivation, because it’s something that takes so long to do that I need to do it now or I won’t have time to as an adult.
So teachers, if you are going to teach me anything, teach me something that will take me days or weeks to learn. Anything easier, and there is no reason for me to learn it now; I can just do it later with negligible time penalty.
