CHAPTER 3
What Factors Motivate Students to Learn?
My Students Are Going to Love This—NOT
This past semester, I finally got to teach a course that relates directly to my area of interest. I put in a lot of time and energy this summer preparing materials and was really excited going into the semester. I used a number of seminal readings in Continental Philosophy and assigned a research project based on primary documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I thought that students would be excited by the topic and would appreciate reading some of the classic works. But it did not turn out the way I had hoped, and I was really disappointed by their work. With the exception of the two philosophy majors and the one student who “needed an ...
