Baking A Cheesecake and Demotivated Students

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Once, I had a friend who wanted to make a cheesecake for her boyfriend. It was a her first time and it was a very random act. Basically she woke up one day and decided that today was the day that she was going to bake a cheesecake. So if she went to the pantry and looked through the cupboard.

To her horror, many of the ingredients that she needed were not available. Instead of buying the necessary ingredients, she decided that she was going to wing it. She took a pan and started pounding any cookie she could find to form the crust. As she had no milk nor cream cheese, those were replaced with evaporated milk and cheddar. What formed was a bowl of milk with floating bits. The floating cheesecake was a sight to behold.

This was the analogy I used today when I was training a group of home tutors. If the students were cheesecakes and the teacher was the baker, the right and precise ingredients are important. A good friend of mine asked if I could provide some in-house training to help teachers motivate demotivated students. After 3 hours of troubleshooting and discussion, the problem could be described in three categories.

The Right Ingredient & Attitude

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The right ingredients should always be used to bake a cheesecake. Replacing certain ingredients with ingredients that sound similar may not be the best idea, as seen in the story above. The same applies to teaching students.

One of the biggest problems with teaching is that we have to teach AND manage the students' attitude. There are times however where it is not possible to do both simultaneously. Thus, it is important to focus on managing the students' attitude first before focusing on the content. Many of the teachers I spoke to pointed out how many of the students were unwilling to try out any task, always claiming that they do not know the answer before giving up completely.

I pointed out that these students have been demotivated. Imagine growing up and having your parents and teachers tell you about how incompetent they are. This is bound to stop them from trying for fear of making mistakes. For that, I have suggested a month long exercise of rewarding the right behavior. In my culture, there is a fear of getting the answer wrong as the students know that they will be punished for making mistakes. Thus, I suggested changing the approach, focusing on getting the students to willingly attempt the questions. The teachers will then have to praise the students for TRYING not getting the answer right.

It Takes Time

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While, many teachers appreciate the paradigm shift on focusing on the right attitude instead of the right answer, they were also interested in how soon will they see results. I told them that this can be a long battle. Many of these students were demotivated by their environment and to undo the damage that has been done all those years, it will take time.

If only teaching students who are demotivated can be done as easy and spontaneous as making a cheesecake. At times, we may even fail as students could be affected by bad exam results or friends in school. These factors could derail any good work. As such, not only will teaching take time, it is also a continuous learning experience.

A Continuous Learning Experience

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For the continuous learning bit, it takes much documentation and much experimentation before coming up with the perfect system to help a demotivated student. This also applies to many of the demotivated students I see. Many of them fail to understand that learning is continuous. Getting an A or a perfect score means nothing if you have no idea what you are doing. It is like discovering and perfecting your own secret recipe to your perfect cheesecake.

Such recipes are not found in cookbooks but scribbled away in some old grandma's journal. Such recipes are created through years of continuous experimentation and learning. My hope is that these teachers will be able bake the perfect cheesecake in the form of a motivated student.

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