Enthusiasm: H-A-P-P-Y, I love my job.
Sorry, it’s a reflex, like avoiding saying the word “announcements” to avoid being mobbed and sung at, but that’s a story for another time. When speaking of education, the conversation tends to be, well, academic. I am perhaps more guilty of this than most, putting my focus on content, methods, techniques, as I have written about at some length in previous posts. Not that these elements are unimportant – far from it – but in focusing on them, it is still possible to fail as an educator, because the act of teaching is more than merely imparting knowledge or inculcating understanding. Learning is necessarily a dialogue between teacher and student, and the skill and knowledge of the teacher are useless without the student’s engagement. Motivating someone to learn is as important as having the skill and knowledge to teach them.
In classes on education, I’ve been taught about concepts like adult learning theory, which is all about how to motivate adults and why adults come to learn in the first place…as if those who are younger are any less in need of such motivation and connection in their educations. Indeed, it is perhaps more vital to apply such backing to the general education which we attempt to impart in traditional schools, for the students subjected to these efforts are there, not by choice, not voluntarily, not in pursuit of some specific and tangible end, as adults tend to be, but because it is mandated. No wonder that so many eschew or deride education. No wonder that it is not perceived as valuable, that so much is forgotten if it was ever learned at all. Perhaps, in a way, we have made education and learning so accessible that it has lost its perceived value.
In teaching my SATCOM fundamentals course, I’ve seen how people don’t remember even basic concepts, or were never taught them, which I assumed were commensurate with a standard high school education. That is concerning, and something which I may perhaps attempt to address in some small way, but that is not the topic of this post. If we want people to learn what we teach, we must motivate them, but motivation is not as simple as providing reasons or context. Often, motivation is depicted as laying out the impacts of the knowledge, the way it connects to “real world” things, how acquiring it will benefit the students in the near or long terms. Sometimes, it can mean illustration of where the concepts are applied in reality, like pointing out how the photoelectric effect is involved in how digital cameras function, or how Faraday’s and Ampere’s laws underpin the operation of motors and generators.
These are fine reasons, but they are not enough as motivation on their own. At least, not if the goal is education. They are sufficient for certification courses, for teaching a single topic to a small, targeted group, but they do not instill a commitment to learning. Something deeper is necessary, something to move beyond extrinsic motivations to affect intrinsic motivations. There are many tools to help foster such engagement, but perhaps the most important, and by far the easiest to deploy, is enthusiasm. Exhibiting and sharing a genuine enthusiasm for your topic, for education in general, is amongst the most powerful tools an educator has to bring students along on the journey towards some small sliver of understanding. It requires no special resources, no fancy tools, no finely honed and practiced techniques, and it can make the difference between people learning something because they must – and promptly dumping the knowledge from their brains after the exam – and people learning something because it seems exciting and worthwhile, and therefore becoming more liable to retain it.
After all, if the authority figure believes the content is important enough to be excited and passionate about, then the students are more likely to agree and to pay attention, if only to learn if that is or is not the case. This does not necessitate gregarious, over-the-top ebullience over, say, partial differential equations; I am far from a gregarious person by nature, and not at all inclined to bubble over with superlatives about present participles or Reimann sums. Enthusiasm doesn’t have to look like a constant smile and too many exclamation points. It can be communicated in cadence, in pointing out connections, in speculating and exhibiting a genuine interest in a topic, even if it is just a small part of a larger whole.
Enthusiasm is not a panacea that will solve all ills in education. The other aspects, in motivation, in content, in delivery, are still vital skills which must be developed and practiced. At best, enthusiasm will paper over flaws or shortcomings in other educational dimensions. However, a lack of enthusiasm will be noted, and it will affect how the lesson and material are received and ingested in powerful ways. Just a little can have an outsized impact, which is probably why I’m so…enthusiastic about this topic.
IGC Publishing 