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On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bon
by georgieporgie 16y ago
On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bonus for B's and A's.. In retrospect, it's amazing how relevant everything suddenly became.
They say it's bad, but it worked well for me.
Also: the reason that High School teachers can't tell you why you need to learn x is that they don't know themselves. Having come into contact with a few teachers as an adult, I'm appalled at how little they know. They seemed a lot smarter when I was 14.
- zasz 16y agoI don't know about point 1. My parents paid me for good grades, and my attitude towards learning is a little warped now, to say the least. (They were also Tiger Parents, though. Motivation is a tricky thing to get right.) For point 2, definitely. I asked my math teacher once what a rigorous definition for a tangent was, and she couldn't give me one. Blah. All these unhappy postdocs and grad students should teach high school.