Piece by Piece

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and even before then, teachers have observed a growing apathy in students toward their schoolwork.

“I wonder if the pandemic years made it tough to get in the school vibe,” social studies teacher Kim Thompson said. “The pandemic years of schooling were pretty lean on academic and behavioral expectations. I imagine we’ll see motivations for that increase over time as people get more used to school again.”

Thompson also acknowledged that Covid wasn’t the only reason students lack drive to do their coursework.

“Some are overwhelmed,” Thompson said. “They’re busy people and are motivated in other arenas in their lives, so it just drains them.”

She also shed light on how a lack in student motivation can affect teachers’ attitudes.

“Luckily, I really like what I teach — I love when students learn anything, even if it’s not everything. My job is for them to leave having learned something, even if it’s just about themselves, so that’s kept me motivated,” Thompson said. “The days were starting to feel real long there at the end of our pandemic school years, so that made me scale back a little bit, which might appear unmotivated.”

For Thompson, the most important aspect of her job is utilizing the time she gets with her students well.

“I can only do what I [teach] for the 90 minutes that are in here. Those 90 minutes are 100% my responsibility; however, there are still 22.5 hours in a day when they’re not with me, so part of this falls on students themselves, especially as they get older. And a lot of it’s on families to say, ‘Are we really motivating kids at home? Or are we pressuring them?’”

Thompson said. “There’s some happy medium where the three of us can triangulate: teachers, parents and students find a way to make school, for some kids, tolerable. For others, they want it to be exciting and challenging. There are 1600 kids here — 1600 different paths and literally 100 staff to try to navigate all 1600 paths.

Ultimately, the solution to the problem will likely come piece by piece, not all at once.

“Maybe the solution we could solve here at school is [to] celebrate the little victories — we don’t have to be perfect at everything,” Thompson said. “Maybe that would motivate kids to try if they didn’t feel so scared of failing. If it was a lot harder to fail, we might feel more motivated to give something a try.”