Importance of having a goal in motivating adolescents

By Gianna Suppa

EDI 17-002

Prof. Dengting Boyanton

February 16, 2011

Journal #9

I feel that it is very important for a students’ motivation to have a dream or goal in life. I believe that students should have multiple goals or dreams in life; some can be short term while others are long term. For example a good short term goal would be to pass an exam in a subject area that you are struggling in while a long term goal could be to get accepted into a university that is a stretch for you.

Throughout my observations, I have found that many students are not extremely motivated and do not have as many dreams as I did while I was in high school. Often times I feel that counselors or teachers can discourage students from having goals or dreams that are a stretch for them, many times they suggest the easy way out. This actually happened to me in high school, I wanted to apply to schools that were a little out of my reach to see if I would get accepted so I would have a wider range of choice and my counselor strongly discouraged me. She told me it was not worth the let down. I didn’t listen to her and applied anyways and ended up getting accepted to two of the schools and wait listed for one. I was not disappointed for a second, I was actually even more proud of myself because she had discouraged me from doing it.

I believe that as teachers we should be extremely supportive towards students dreams, even if at times we know that they are a little out of the students range. I feel that accomplishing a dream or getting close to accomplishing a dream is a valuable lesson for a student to learn. Such a lesson teaches students to strive for things, work hard, and never give up on something they care about. I don’t feel that we should be supportive of letting high school students just to whatever they want. Their aspirations and dreams should be realistic and un-harmful to them. We should not encourage bad behavior or un-reasonable behavior but I see no problem with encouraging educational and personal goals to greater the student as a whole.