Growing up, my passion for academics and acquiring knowledge was nothing like it is today.  The only things I was ever able to get motivated for always had a connection to sports.  This became most notable in my early childhood years when homework began getting sent home and my parents would struggle to get me sitting down for more than thirty minutes to complete an assignment or study for a spelling test.  On the other hand, waking me up for hockey practice on a Monday morning at 5:30am before school was never a problem.  Clearly I was a little bit more motivated for one over the other, but where did this ambition come from and why was it so different for these two different parts of my life?  One would think that the same brain would be as highly motivated for one activity as it is for the other, but that was certainly not the case.

Through my middle childhood years I was definitely motivated extrinsically.  Individuals who are extrinsically motivated attempt to “attain or avoid certain consequences in the outside world, such as getting adult approval or avoiding punishment from family” (Woolfolk, Perry, McDevitt, & Ormrod, 2015, p. 401). In our house, my parents always rewarded great behaviour and results; likewise there was punishment for when things weren’t going so well. I feel like I lived most of my childhood years trying to gain approval of my parents and teachers. I was always looking to demonstrate that I was more capable than my peers, and definitely noticed when I was not above the set standard of normal achievement.

Up until grade five, I found myself in a rut of having very authoritarian like teachers. During this time I was very unmotivated to do well in school, due to the ways these teachers presented themselves in the classroom. I was never engaged in what the teacher had to teach and this reflected on my report cards. In grade six and seven I was lucky enough to get two teachers who had a much more experiential approach to teaching. Their practical approach to teaching and encouragement of group discussion catered much more to my learning style. It was during this time when I began to enjoy learning and studying. These two particular teachers enabled me achieve success in the classroom, which lead to me being much more intrinsically motivated when it came to my studies. In Human Development, Learning, and Diversity we are told that by enhancing a child’s self-efficacy and promoting intrinsic motivation they will do better in school (Woolfolk, Perry, McDevitt, & Ormrod, 2015, p. 421). This statement correctly lines up with my experiences in school and it is too bad it didn’t happen at an earlier age.

I have always been a kinetic learner and really wish that throughout my school years there were more opportunities to learn in a more experiential setting.  If teachers of different subjects, such as English, Socials Studies, and Math took different approaches to teaching other than just sitting in front of the class and regurgitating out facts.  I recently watched a TED Talks done by Emily Pilloton that demonstrated a kinetic way of teaching Math to a grade four class.  In brief, she would take the classroom outside and organize them into two teams.  She would call out a math equation and one child from each team would run out to the field and try to find the correct answer from the answers that were scattered out through the field (Pilloton, 2010).  In the video clip you can see that all the students are so engaged in the activity and wanting to learn more.  I feel like if I had more experiences similar to the one described above throughout my childhood years, I would have been much more motivated to succeed.