On Motivation

I am sitting here on my couch, on a Sunday at noon writing this blog post. This seems to be the new place where the blog posts are written and not at my desk. Which I guess is appropriate because this post is going to be about change, time (sorry I have been thinking a lot about Bergson this week), and as the title notes- motivation. Sitting on the couch has given me motivation to write this post. This may also be a longer post where I will try to connect the dots and I hope I do but if I don't and I'm sorry about that too; I have a lot of thoughts and feels this week. 

I am about 2 and a half months in to living in my new city. I am still enjoying living here, and I think I have successfully moved past that transitional space and the change that comes with it in certain ways. I have reached the point where I can look back and move from my firm "there is nothing I miss about my old city" stance that I had in the first 8 to 10 weeks, to my stance now which is I really miss certain kinds of food I will never find here, and also I miss not being in a place where I know where the protests will be and where to join them. Those are the two things I miss so far. I am sure there will be others because time changes perspective. I also promise the pedagogical part of this post is coming.

Those of you who know me know that I am very much into Bergson's concept of duree. If you want to know how much I love duree, you can read this article I wrote about time in The Hours (opens in new tab). The thing about duree when you are experiencing change in your life is that it sort of both breaks down because change is of course a spatial quantifier that is uncapturable in "duree pure" and is also perpetually there because duree reminds us the present is always fleeting. November is the time of the school year when everything changes, and the fleeting present is very real. Gone are the feelings of possibility of a new year, replaced for instructors and students with the forever present feelings of what is next, what check box do I need to check, when is the next long weekend, how long to the holiday break? It is a time where inertia becomes a big definer of what happens for the remainder of the term and it becomes a lot more difficult to move from one state to the other.

Newton's first law of motion (opens in new tab to an open textbook on college physics) states a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. It is definitely outside the scope of this post to deeply problematize or analyze this with a disability lens, but what I do want to note in relation to inertia is that November often tends to be the time where folk either continue to speed up because of the pressures the educational systems put on them (due dates, meetings, etc) or a time where people just stay at rest because they were sort of just observing the leaves in October and they are now overwhelmed with to dos and a path forward is harder to discover. If you are at rest, if you are not in motion, in November, chances are you will maintain that rest into the holiday season, and if you are the kind of person where that stop perpetuates anxiety these are difficult weeks.

Those who are in higher ed right now see this happen in the eduspaces. If you have been in higher ed spaces for a while you come to see the patterns of support needs most required for students, faculty, and staff at different times of the term. Students stop attending class, and priorities are shifted, so folk ask how do we motivate students in the middle of term? Folk stop coming to meetings and stop responding to emails, and so people ask how do we get people to respond to asks and meet due dates? This is a time where people try to decide if this is a 2024 problem or if there is time to move something forward in the remaining 4-5 weeks of term. Calculations are done about what minimum needs to happen to pass a class, to get a box checked, to make it through to the next stage of a project. Then you add what is happening in the world to all of those calculations and of course it difficult to find motivation.

So of course I looked into the etymology of motivation and it is a Victorian word, from 1873, from the German about incentivizing to action. I also looked up the etymology of the word boredom, because I have also been thinking about that this week, and of course it is also a Victorian word, 1845, because they are both very much tied to doing, to action, to work.

Full disclosure, I was asking myself if I even wanted to write a blog post this week, because I am also struggling with motivation. My work patterns have shifted so much, that I very much feel like a car that has sat in a parking lot for too long and I need call CAA for a boost cause my battery low light is on, from not being overloaded with asks. This same thing happens with students depending on the way courses are organized in terms of assessment due dates. If there is nothing due for weeks at the beginning to middle of term, and then all of a sudden everything is due, even the most scaffolded of classes will see drops in attendance, lack of energy and motivation, and that is even without the weight of the world events happening. November is the month where everyone asks themselves what do I need to do to make it through? 

I had a great chat with a friend this morning and one of the things she reminded me of is the need to reflect on things a bit more and to use in-between times for that reflection. She reminded me that I am moving from a check box system way of doing work, to a everything is long range future planning way of doing work, and that a happy medium must exist somewhere so that the car doesn't get covered in leaves in the parking lot while waiting to be used. It had me thinking about what we can do to balance the asks in relation to courses in a way that is more supportive of folk, that allow for flexibility, that allow for grace, that don't push everything in relation to a course to the last two weeks of November and the first week of December. It had me thinking about formative activities that can be done in class to maintain motivation, that are not just about scaffolding to a project or a big to do, but that reinforce why this is being asked or done in the first place.

It is hard to maintain motivation and find the why when the why is seemingly disconnected with the deep needs in our world today. A need for peace, a need for food, a need for shelter. I had my students do a conflict resolution reflection this week in class. This is an assignment that I include in my class occasionally and it felt even more important now. Maybe there are other whys that need to be reinforced in your classes. Maybe there are other whys that need to be brought up at the conferences you are at to motivate folk to do the important work (POD folk I am talking directly to you here, those of you with the coin to go to your pricey conference, I am directly asking you to make a difference at the conference so that maybe there will be less gatekeeping next year). 

If you made it to the end of this post, thank you for having the motivation to do so. I hope I have given you a few things to think about, maybe some changes or activities you can implement for your classes, maybe some different ways to think about what we are asking of folk this time of the year.