My new job should be motivational speaking

I set out to create a Prezi (presentation tool) about goal setting for my students because we had this speaker come to our school yesterday, and one of the things she said is that our students literally don’t know how to set a goal and achieve it (which is true). It kind of turned into more or less a rant about students making excuses for not doing work. I’m sick of complaining about students being ‘lazy’ and not doing work. I’m sick of looking at all the zeroes in my grade book and sighing. I’m sick of coming off as mean to my students when I lecture them about turning in homework. If I’m just complaining and making excuses without at least trying to fix the problem I’m just as bad. And I hate being negative. They just look at me with blank stares and probably think I’m crazy.

So I began a Prezi about how to cut up the reading assignments for the novel we just started ,To Kill A Mockingbird , so the students could actually consider reading the book a do-able activity. To us it is an amazing, Pulitzer Prize winning, timeless piece of American literature. But most students looked at the book as I was handing it out, realized they had to read it on their own and said “Miss I ain’t readin’ this”.

But they have to read it!!!!!! So I decided to attempt the goal setting lesson as this lady taught us at the workshop. What started as a presentation on goal setting with passing the third MP as the goal in mind ended as sort of a rant/lecture/motivational presentation on achieving goals in life and making excuses. Most students will probably just think I’m crazy again and not care, but I want to at least try to instill a goal setting mindset that I had when I was their age. Students of poverty just don’t have the same social norms and ideas about setting goals in life and achieving them as I did when I was growing up. It’s a whole different mindset and world they live in. I understand that their world is probably more scary and difficult than mine, but I do believe in doing everything I can to help them succeed in spite of (and more importantly because of) their home lives. Doing the same thing over and over again is insanity. I can try different things until something works. Here’s the presentation:

Prezi

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