Flood in Bandung. More ferry and plane accidents. Sigh.
Had lunch with Head of Outreach from a well-known educational foundation that conducted teacher trainings, distributed scholarships, etc. Asked him how they go about selecting the schools to target their teacher training programs, and how the responses are.
It hasn’t been easy. Most teachers and headmasters would rather not get any programs running in their schools. Extra programs mean extra work. There is no need to further their own knowledge. As is, they are content. Have a nice, easy life. Why bother?
Sigh.
How long can one go before they hit absolute bottom and realize that it’s time to change? Or is it a bottomless pit?
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4 comments:
For good or bad, people respond to incentive. Wrong incentive leads you to wrong response. Easier said than done, this is not as straightforward as it seems though.
Say, additional aid goes to region with larger number of poor, so one possible incentive for the administrator there is to increase the number of the poor. OK,then,you may want more money goes to one that reduces the poverty instead, but the region might not as poor as the former. What would you do?
I would definitely pick the one with more motivated people - be it leaders or members of the community. If it happens to be the richer one, so be it. The money will be better spent by them than by those who increase their poverty simply to get the money.
As you can see, I'm all for motivated people. I've been trying to find a way to trigger internal incentives to learn. So let me know if you have any tricks.
I met an economist who teaches at UI on Friday. His way is to do quizzes at the beginning of every single class and have intricate system for points of additions and reductions as part of his scheme. That won't do in my design studio though ;)
On how to trigger (econ student's) internal incentives to learn, I must admit I don't really know. But from my side, what I can do is to make it relevant to the daily life as much as possible. Actually I took this advice from Seno Gumira Adjidarma on a student magazine's training on how to write well, back to my old college years. He said, "why don't you write on the impact chilli's price hike on the sale of warung Padang", or something like that.
Back to the opening words of Kiera on national income discussion, it works better than the next lecture's --that is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, on money and inflation. Apparently, for my fellow students, Hollywood is closer to their life than that old revolutionary figure :-).
The relevance to their lives is the key it seems.
I’ve tried to motivate them by thinking about their own future (how more relevant could this be), how everything they learn, no matter how insignificant or how irrelevant it is currently, could eventually be made useful if they make it so. But it’s probably not as popular, sexy, or ‘relevant’ as Hollywood.
Instead of Lenin, perhaps it’s time to try MTV for a change, it may trigger more interest with this generation of students ;)
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