Drumming up the motivation to study every day is one of the biggest challenges for many students. With so many school activities and limited time to pursue all of them, a student may soon find it difficult to concentrate. Of course, losing concentration is the first step towards losing motivation. You don’t want the tough struggle that comes from pushing through school without the right level of motivation. Therefore, you’ll need to find what keeps you motivated at all times. To help, this article contains useful tips on how to get motivated for school. Read on to find out more.
What Causes Lack of Motivation for School?
Different children have different factors that trigger their low interest in school work. To help them, you must first understand these factors and decisively deal with them. While the factors may differ from child to child, they all have one goal – to reduce a child’s interest in school. Some of the common reasons why students lack interest in studies include:
Seeing No Purpose in Studying
Students will find understanding a subject difficult if they deem the subject useless to their pursuits irrespective of study level. Gone are the days when students study to make better grades. Today, it takes more than grade-pursuit to motivate students. To motivate students, you’ll need to introduce them to the practicalities of the subjects. Introducing them to this aspect helps them to understand the real-life application of each subject and its relevance to their academic pursuit.
Boring Teaching Methods
Teachers play a significant role in triggering the students’ interest in different subjects. Students have different learning needs and preferences, and except a teacher channels their teaching methods to meet these needs, students may find them boring.
Of course, nobody would want to pay attention to long boring classes. Factors like stress, low pay, and overburden can kill teachers’ morale, preventing them from putting in the extra effort to make their lessons fun and engaging for the students.
Challenging Subjects
It’s a known fact that an average human would tend to shy away from tasks they consider too difficult. It’s typically the same for students. Repeated failure in a particular subject can make students hate the subject. Once a student develops negative feelings about a subject, it becomes challenging for them to stay motivated through that subject.
Unrealistic Lofty Expectations
While it’s not necessarily wrong to encourage students to be ambitious, overdoing it can also make them lose interest. Setting expectations can encourage students to work harder, but setting expectations too high can discourage students from trying their best. Unrealistic expectations can make students feel like they can never do enough and, as such dejected. It can even lead to depression, and at this point, they would have completely lost interest in the subject.
Uncomfortable Learning Environment
No doubt, the learning environment contributes to a student’s ability to pursue success. A comfortable and safe environment would make students relaxed and ready to learn. On the other hand, a hostile environment will make students less interested in doing anything serious. Therefore, it’s vital to ensure that students have all the supplies they need for a comfortable learning experience.
Factors like bullying, strained relationships with teachers, and conflicts with other students can also make the learning environment less comfortable for students, making them lose interest.
What Do You Do if You are not Motivated for School?
As a student, you’ll experience times when your life will simultaneously be turned upside down by an event or daily occurrence. When such happens, you’ll find yourself ill-motivated to do anything, including studying. But the workload would keep piling, irrespective of whether you are motivated to study or not. The key to overcoming such periods is to find things that will get you motivated and stick to doing them. To help, here are some simple recommendations for students that are not motivated for school.
Get small daily goals
Whether you just gained admission into high school or just entering college, the biggest goal is to graduate successfully and pursue higher learning. However, this goal can become boring with time, and except you have something to spice it up, you can lose interest in school. One strategy that has worked for staying motivated in school is creating small goals that you must achieve daily. Start every week by writing down everything you’ll like to accomplish that week. Now divide the week’s task by the number of days you’ll attend school throughout the week. This way, you’ve got a few objectives you must achieve every day, and struggling to accomplish each objective can take your mind off the long boring hours of school.
Pair work with fun and exciting activities
This is the reason why school clubs and societies exist in schools. Repetitive learning can become tiresome to even the most serious students. However, adding fun to the learning process can make students look forward to each subject. If your school doesn’t make provision for fun, you can do it yourself. Little things like picking a comfortable spot and playing your favorite music when studying can help you remain focused when learning.
Imagine the life you want as an adult
School can sometimes feel boring on a day to day basis, and when it does, you’ll find yourself asking if it’s worth the stress. To help you get over this boredom, you can think of the good things you want to do in the future and note that you may not be able to achieve these things without proper education. If you lack motivation at any point, you can write a list of things you want to accomplish in the future and continuously remind yourself that you’ll need your education to get a job that can foot the bills for those things.
How to Get in the Mood for School?
Getting back in school mood after a long break can sometimes feel like a hard mountain to climb, especially if your holiday has been filled with lots of fun and relaxing activities. Here are tips to help ease you back into your studies again.
Start with something easy
You are just coming from a long break where you didn’t do anything related to your study. At this point, it’s impossible to jump back to your previous speed before your holiday. Like athletes, you are expected to start small and gradually get into your regular study routine again. Also, think about focusing on the easier parts of your studies and incorporate fun when possible until you are comfortable with working at full capacity again.
Create a schedule
At this point, it’ll feel like you are a newbie to school again, but with the right steps, you should be fine in no time. Keeping a schedule of when you’ll get things done will help you stay motivated by completing various tasks. While creating a schedule, ensure that you do not set unrealistic deadlines for each task, as this can easily become counterproductive.
Start steadying stuff from before the break gets over
One awful mistake that students make is to wait until full resumption before they start trying to study. While this might work for you, it would be difficult to catch up with people that started preparing during the break. Therefore, if you do not want to lose any time preparing, you must be ready to study your materials during the break too. It helps eliminate the feeling of starting from scratch when you resume and makes it feel like you are picking up from where you left.
5 Best Motivation Tips for High School Students
Staying motivated in high school can be a very tough task. In fact, for many students, it is the biggest obstruction to achieving success in education. It’s challenging for high school students to stay motivated, considering the newness of the environment and the overwhelming nature of work that they have to put up with daily. To help, here are tips for staying motivated in high school.
Be proud of your achievements
While it’s good to seek to achieve bigger things, you can’t overlook the little you’ve achieved over time. Instead, you can turn them into motivation as you pursue other goals. For starters, memorize past achievements and successes and let them occupy your mind instead of your failures. Additionally, you can read about the heroes you admire and incorporate the things they did rightly into your daily routine.
Avoid comparing yourself with others
Comparing yourself with others in terms of results achieved is one of the easiest ways to kill your motivation. Never forget that several factors combine to determine what you’ll achieve over time. The truth is that there will always be people ahead of you, and comparing yourself with such people will make you feel like you are not putting in any efforts yet. Instead of comparing yourself with people, try focusing on your results and think about how you can improve them.
Set rewards for accomplishing tasks
Everyone likes to get a reward, and people would double their efforts if there’s a reward attached to a task. You don’t need to wait for anyone to set rewards for you since you can do it yourself. And it doesn’t even have to be something big. Something as small as getting a movie ticket as a reward for studying several hours a week can be the motivation you need to work harder.
Break the material into chunks
Perhaps the reason why it seems like there’s no motivation for school anymore is because of the bulkiness and complicated nature of materials you’ll need to study. Why fall into the trap of procrastination when you can chunk down? Breaking down tasks into smaller units makes them look easier and achievable.
Assign yourself a certain number of jobs per day and try to finish them before the day runs out.
Find a way to make boring subjects interesting
You need to realize that high school is not always as fun as it looks in movies. There are times when you’ll need to sit through boring classes to learn boring subjects. It’s easy for people to lose motivation during these class sessions. Start by asking yourself if the subject is really boring or you are just disinterested. If it’s a lack of interest, you can meet a teacher or counselor to help you deal with it.
3 Best Motivation Tips for College Students
Like high school, college comes with its challenges too. These challenges can be terrifying sometimes, and except you find a way to deal with them, you may soon begin to lack the motivation to go to school every day. Here, let’s review some tips that will help you stay motivated through school.
Stick to making the right friends
As usual, friends can help you walk through the most demanding challenges. This is college – an unfamiliar terrain, and your choice of friends can make or mar your confidence to pursue excellence. If you want to stay motivated through college, you must be willing to pick friends who share the same goals. Such friends can help you choose your pieces when it feels like you’ve hit rock bottom. Don’t rush to start picking your friends. Take time to study the character of each acquaintance and choose the ones that best suit your personality.
Study in short bursts
Of course, students typically learn better when they study in short bursts. It’s known as “spaced learning,” which is a theory that suggests that learning involves the creation of memories.
Studies show that memories are formed when neurons link together, and for these memories to become embedded, you’ll need to leave the neurons undisturbed for some time.
This is why experts recommend short bursts of study for students, considering that it gives the neurons enough time to lay down the new memories.
Create a perfect study space
It’s usually amazing seeing the influence your environment has on your mental state. Organizing your desk to put everything within reach can be the key that unlocks a successful study session. If your study place is in your room, you’ll want to consider keeping your room tidy and organized. The key here is making your study environment as comfortable as possible.
Wrapping Things Up: How to Get Motivated for School
Staying focused in school can seem like a hard mountain to climb if you do not have the right motivation. Unfortunately, it is easy to lose motivation. However, students have to realize they are losing motivation and work consciously towards fixing things. If getting motivated seems like a hard nut to crack, you should see your school counselor. However, the motivation tips for college students in this article can help put you back on the track of pursuing success.
If you found this post helpful, you’re definitely going to like these other posts:
> How to Do Well in School: 50 Ways