Have you spent any time teaching unmotivated students?
Yes, ideally, every student would be motivated to learn for its own sake, but for an individual say, 8th grade, teacher to get a class of kids to that point is an enormous task. And yes, perhaps the entire education system should be revamped so that kids never lose motivation, but how to do that is hardly a solved problem.
Which means "Here's the deeper principles that motivate this problem" is going to have a huge uphill battle against "just tell us how to do the problems that are going to be on the test", or worse, "this has no relevancy to my life, so I'm going to tune out this entire class".
I have taught kids ranging from 6 years old to 2nd year University undergrads. The really young kids were in the setting of a coding bootcamp while the 2nd year undergrads were in a Tutorial. I'm just prefacing my comment by saying that I've experienced a large range of ages and abilities.
I always see this excuse as a failure of the teacher, rather than the students. I believe students want to learn, and the non-motivation is usually a result of something that isn't so hard that the teacher can't get around it. I used to feel that way before and only gear my lessons towards the motivated ones (why should I waste my time on kids who dont want to learn?), but I realized that it was I who was not motivated enough to get through to those kids. The movie "Stand and Deliver" portrays what I'm trying to say in a really fun and useful way.
I think teachers need to be held to a higher standard and blaming their lack of success on students should be the last resort, after everything has been tried. Sure you'll get some really pathological cases where the student is absolutely unreachable, but I think that's so rare that it's not worth talking about.
I think it depends on overall context (socio-economic status of parents, what they see everyday, what other teachers do, what the policy of the school is in general, what their society at large perceives as success, etc.).
Empirical observation however -- and I've taught 2 different secondary schools myself although just for a couple of years -- tells us that some students are motivated and others are not. The teacher can try and nudge them towards the subject, but it wont do that much with most of the unmotivated students. My experience has been in what in the US you'd call "inner city" schools btw.
I'm not saying that this is an absolute rule, so individual counter-examples don't really negate this, unless they do indicate a reverse GENERAL trend. Sure, you could get a greatly motivated student even in a crappy school with crappy teachers, the question is how often would that happen.
I also don't agree that the teacher should be "held to a higher standard" (at least when meant to an extreme). Sure, there are indeed crappy teachers.
But students should come into school willing to learn and respecting the environment, something that's not always the case. It shouldn't be up to the teacher to do some special stunts to get the students basic attention -- instead of, say, playing mobile games on their smartphones, talking to each other loudly, even listening to music on headphones.
I think its the teachers job to earn the students' respect, by not only being a role model but also demonstrating genuine interest in the topic they are teaching. I think that when I show how deeply I love the topic I'm teaching, it rubs off on the students and they go along with it.
Also, you seem to be arguing from the perspective of what is rather than what ought to be. I'm arguing for a shift in perspective where teacher competence and enthusiasm and high expectations of students isn't something special or extra, but rather the norm.
>I think its the teachers job to earn the students' respect
Students should have a respect for school (and the role of the teacher) before any other kind of respect can be earned by the teacher as an individual.
Or, to put it another way, earning the students respect as a teacher is OK.
But having to earn the attention, and having to fight against students making noise, playing, ignoring the lesson etc, should not be the case.
>I think that when I show how deeply I love the topic I'm teaching, it rubs off on the students and they go along with it.
As I said, assuming the teacher is capable and passionate, it still depends on the students. Depending on the school/area/class/etc some students wouldn't care even if Alan Kay taught them programming and Richard Feynman did physics.
The idea that students will be captivated by a passionate and eloquent teacher doesn't always pan out in reality. A lot of times it's more like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdf_XdDwc-o
>Also, you seem to be arguing from the perspective of what is rather than what ought to be.
Well, to get things to where it "ought to be" you should first tackle and work with "what is".
I'm really curious why it is that students seem to just inherently care about test scores. Surely they were born with such passion for seeing "A" over "B" over "C," and so on.
If they were taught to care about deeper principles from day one, I guarantee they would care about deeper principles by year 8.
That would take a society that also cares about deeper principles, starting with parents etc., and not just "getting into university" and "getting a good job" (and that's when it's not just "make shitloads of money").
