Chapter 6: Motivation and Boredom

In chapter six of Fires the hot button topic was motivation, what gets kids motivated, what keeps them motivated and what teachers can do to keep them motivated. As this chapter states, boredom is something so common in classrooms, and talks about what, you as a teacher, can do to try and keep students interested and doing their homework. Also discussed in this chapter, is how to correctly give homework, so instead of finding it arbitrary, students will be encouraged to do it and be excited it.

Being passionate about your content is something that I think is so important as a teacher, and is something that some of the different students in this talk about. I know, that in high school, I was always more motivated to succeed in the classes where I knew that the teacher cared about the subject and cared about us all succeeding. Another part of this chapter that I really found interesting was that students don't feel more motivated by hearing that school is important, because that's something that you always hear teachers tell students who don't want to do their work, so hearing more than one student saying that hearing that doesn't motivate them was really interesting.