Eagerness

There’s a Shim Gum Do master who sort of runs a school down in Pennsylvania somewhere. I don’t really understand the exact nature of the school. I’ve been wanting to visit it for some time out of a sort of professional curiosity. But, I think it’s kind of like a private school that is heavily influenced by the Buddhism. They have a full curriculum and the students can additionally study Shim Gum Do martial arts.

This last weekend a bunch of them came up for the bi-monthly test. A couple of them tested for their black belts. The principal of their school came up as well. He brought his son who also tested. They often make this trip and each time I find it interesting to see and talk to teenagers who are not my students, and kind of observe their behavior and interactions. I run a sort of compare/contrast in my head in-part because I know that my population doesn’t really reflect the majority of teenagers and I feel kind of starved for a norm reference to organize the way I think about and deal with my students.

On this particular trip something interesting really struck me that I’d seen in small ways before but never really appreciated. These visiting Shim Gum Do students have a sort of eagerness that I almost never see in my own boys. They want to learn the martial art. They want to participate in stuff going on around the temple. They’ll volunteer to do things. They have some of what I think I’ve heard the Zen master refer to as thirst, or hunger. So, the big question of course is “What accounts for the difference?”

One cause could be just a lot of background stuff that I cannot assess. The Shim Gum Do students are obviously not on the island because they probably haven’t done the kind of stuff that gets my students sent there. But I wonder if there aren’t certain factors that can be controlled to advantage.

The island program is philosophically a program of “choice.” That is to say a student cannot enter our school without first having been interviewed and indicated an intent, a desire, a decision to enroll. The problem is that this isn’t a very good description of what actually happens. For one thing the choice is often between the island and jail. It seems to me to be a little hard to make it more compulsive than that. But, other factors come into play as well: some of it real and some of it merely in the minds of the boys. For example they get pressure from all kinds of “grown-ups” including parents, social workers, ed advocates, probation officers, etc., etc., etc. Then sometimes the kids feel that certain aspects of the school were misrepresented and they end up feeling like they were more or less bamboozled into coming. Sometimes they even claim that case workers or parents basically forged their signatures to make them come here. I consider this situation in light of my own experiences as a teenager and I have to recognize that the very fact of compulsion could turn me from being interested into defiant if simply on principle. Those things I invested the most in were things that I felt wholly I had chosen out for myself.

A second controllable factor may be the issue of novelty. It has been reported in some ed psych text I’ve read somewhere or other that one thing that keeps a person interested and motivated to learn something new is when that something truly is new and not the everyday thing. Though they come from time to time the Pennsylvanian students are not here all the time and coming is for them something of a change of pace in their day to day school lives. It may be the very facts of getting away, sleeping in a different place, and seeing and interacting with different people that help to facilitate increased openness for learning experiences.
Part of the experience of learning martial arts is that there are certain goals that one is trying to achieve. Part of the goal is to get to the next rank. But some of the goals are more personal and internal. They might be athletic but they are also often psychological and spiritual. There is something intrinsically motivating about having goals to orient ourselves to motivate us for learning. This is something that is often missing in ordinary schooling. At many levels in traditional academic subjects the precise goals can be rather elusive to students (and frankly the teachers who have to teach them). And where the goals are detached, externally imposed, and ambiguous they do not satisfy the requirements of psychological proximity necessary to motivate engagement. Additionally, I believe the naturally occurring adolescent egocentrism makes the value of personal psychological and spiritual goals particularly salient. It is something that secular educational institutions would struggle to capitalize on and tragically so.