In the SLA module, we’ve recently covered aptitude and motivation. This got me thinking, but not about the students – about myself.

We’ve learnt that motivation is a dynamic system, many things affect it day-day and its ever-changing. My motivation for this diploma and for teaching in general is much the same. There are many factors that affect my motivation, here are a few:

• Personal life (it’s my first year of marriage, my relationships with friends – often positive, yet sometimes challenging)
• Hobbies (I run a micro-record label, organise events, produce and perform music in various guises for various projects – rewarding, yet time-consuming)
• Work (an unstable industry with no job security – currently more work than I can handle, yet can be rewarding – and it pays the bills)
• The course (regular and fairly heavy workload for the Materials module, big essay on the fast-approaching horizon for SLA, disappointing lesson observations, yet I’m also learning a lot, developing as a teacher and occasionally doing good work)

I think the main things affecting my motivation currently is a sense of lack of time. Lack of time to spend with my wife, lack of time to do my hobbies, lack of time due to amount of work (the other day I left my house at 7.45 am and got back at 8.30 pm and was either teaching or preparing to teach that whole time, minus 12 minutes for lunch and 45 minutes for walking between locations), lack of time to do work for this course, pressure on knowing I have 3 lesson observations to do in less than two months… That feeling of pressure and stress can really affect me, my teaching and my work both at my school and at university.

A happy teacher is a good teacher, a stressed teacher is often not. A friend of mine remarked that complaints about teachers at our school always increase when they are doing their DELTA or diploma due to the stress the teacher is under. It is vital to maintain good motivation in not just our learners, but also ourselves.

How to do this, well, I’m still figuring that part out!

I’ve also been thinking about my own aptitude for teaching. We learnt in SLA that there seems to be some truth in the statement that some people learn languages better than others, and I think it’s probably true that some people teach better than others. I don’t consider myself as particularly having much aptitude to teaching – it definitely does not come naturally to me, it is something I really have to work at. It is hard work.

Elements of teaching I feel I do do well. We’ve recently completed a worksheet-designing seminar on the Materials module, and I feel fairly proud of what I achieved. Designing tasks – that, I feel I can do.

I was also fairly proud of my performance in the Language Awareness module. I ‘get’ grammar and feel I have a good understanding of how language works.

But the actual in-class performance? The actual teaching? That is something I feel I struggle with.

It probably doesn’t help that the last few observations I’ve had I felt were disappointing. I felt I didn’t do we as well as I could have. That, compounded with the affect on my motivation due to a sense of pressure and lack of time, adds to the stress of the next assessed observation I have next week.

On the bright side, regardless of aptitude for language learners, they can still achieve. I know that I can still teach well – and I do – aptitude isn’t everything. But it is a factor that I’ve become increasingly aware of – I feel I have to put more effort in to deliver a good lesson than some of my peers who seem to have a much more natural ability in this area.

UPDATE: I think this Critical Incident was written at a time when my motivation for teaching and learning was in a trough. I believe motivation is something that is dynamic, that fluctuates extremely from time to time. Since writing this Critical Incident, I have felt that my aptitude for teaching has improved and this has affected my motivation in turn. As a result, I no longer feel that much of what I have written for this Critical Incident is exactly true. However, it was an essential incident for me to write about – as once it was out of me, down on paper (so to speak), I felt I could move on from it which resulted in me, almost by accident, improving the situation. 

What I guess I’m trying to say here is that I now think that this Critical Incident may no longer be ‘true’, but it was an important stage for me to go through.