Motivation

I am in this class because it is required, but I am also in this class because I heard it was super interesting. I am in the education program because I want to be a teacher. I have always wanted to be a teacher and look forward to teaching history to young adults.

The hope of being successful motivates me. I always try my best and hope that it is good enough. I am also motivated by my parents, since they will stop paying for my education if I don't do well. The main thing that motivates me is my future. I have always been a firm believer that you should not just live for the moment, but you should think about tomorrow, and the next day... and well, the day after that. I try to act in a way that will benefit my future.

I succeed because I try and I fail when I don't try. I have learned to overcome learned helplessness and no longer think that everything I do will not be good enough or will not get the grade that I want. I have found that when I have a positive outlook and think about what affect certain things will have on my future, I succeed. When I fail it is because I didn't work hard enough or I decided not to care. I also fail when I get really bad anxiety. I feel like most of my anxiety is dehabilitating and when this happens I fail. This is why I have learned to get things done more than an hour before it is due. I do not work as well under pressure, which is a good and a bad thing in my humble opinion. I am very good at adapting, which helps me to succeed, but I totally crack under pressure. I feel like luck has a lot to do with getting things done at the last minute, or when you are under a lot of pressure. Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of luck. When I am working under pressure or at the last minute, even though I have the ability to do the assignment, I feel overwhelmed and start to get really bad anxiety and think that I will not be able to get it done in time so most of the time I decide not to do it, or I just do it half-hearted.

I believe that the goals in my course contract do reflect mastery and performance goals. These goals show that I am driven and want to be the best possible teacher that I can be. I want to help students learn and enable them to be open to learning for the rest of their lives. It doesn't matter to me if they like history, or want to learn about history for the rest of their lives, but I just want them to be willing to learn. It is important to be able to be willing to learn new things throughout your life so you can be trainable for jobs that you will have.

I have always been kind of scared to take this class because I heard that it is a lot of work and challenging. I need to get rid of these preconceptions and work as hard as I can to learn the material and be able to apply it in my life. Just because something is challenging doesn't mean that it is going to kill me. I should learn to accept these challenges because it will expand my mind and allow me to become a really great teacher. I am ready to accept the challenges that life throws at me and I will not back down just because I have heard something is really hard. Teaching high school is really hard, but I don't care. I still want to do it. In order to be a great teacher, I need to make it a habit to motivate myself so that I will be successful in motivating my students. Even though all my students will not necessarily have a dispositional interest in history, hopefully they can at least have a situational interest and be interested in at least one aspect of history or one event.