COLUMN: Finding motivation for the upcoming semester can be done
Making the transition from the care free days of vacation the monotonous routine of school is just about as easy as getting onto the QUAD during the first week of classes, and only a tad less annoying. Such a difficult transition makes it difficult for students to motivate themselves for the semester ahead.
Though I personally feel that such academic apathy is healthy, I cannot ignore the eventual effects that it will have on you later on in the semester. You see, in your motivationless state you will first fail to care about all impending assignments and tests, but as these things begin to pile up and your grades starts to suffer, you are suddenly blasted into reality, which isn’t (by the way) the revelation that your education is suffering, but instead that your preciously saved tuition money will have been wasted.
Foreseeing such a predicament, and wanting to bring you a solution for the beginning of the semester, I decided to sacrifice my precious vacation time in order to think of something to help curb this inevitable motivation vacuum.
It didn’t take too many seconds of tedious thinking before I decided to take a well-deserved break and go to one of the several Utah State basketball games played over the break. Ironically enough, as I was observing this game and what it was that motivated the crowd, I realized what the ultimate motivator, for any situation, was. The game I’m speaking of was the championship game of the Gossner Classic with Loyola Marymount.
By my estimation, there were three things that made the crowd cheer louder that night than anything else. First was the last second shot made by the scout team’s own Jimmy Edwards. Second, embarrassingly enough for Loyola Marymount, was after one of their players finally hit a shot after a one of their painfully long scoring droughts. The third thing, however, is what caught my interest in terms of motivation application. I’m speaking of the moment the cheerleaders came out to throw miscellaneous objects into the crowd.
The more I think about it, the more difficult this obvious crowd motivator is to explain. Usually these miscellaneous objects range from mini frisbees and basketballs to small, plastic water bottles. These kinds of things aren’t exactly hot items in stores across the nation, they’re probably not at the top of anybody’s Christmas list, and I doubt they’ll be showcased in Antique Roadshow anytime soon. Yet, for some reason, the crowd goes absolutely nuts over acquiring them. Perfectly sane individuals will turn to ravenous animals in the short matter of seconds that it takes for the cheerleaders hold the objects up for all to see. (And cheerleaders, of course, recognize this inexplicable power they hold. Just watch the cunning glitter in their eyes as they wield these worthless objects in the air.)
As a past recipient of one of these “prizes” (and being, of course, quite jubilant in my triumph at the time), I can promise that they serve no purpose outside of that game where they were received besides gathering dust in a corner of my room. That hardly matters. The cheerleaders could somberly relay that same information to the audience one second and then present the useless object spoken of the next and the crowd would immediately start pushing old people and children out of the way to get at it. Inexplicable though this behavior is, I realized that it is the solution to all of our motivational problems. As students, all we need to do is get a hold of a bunch of worthless objects and give them to our professors on the first day of classes. Then, once the professors suspect that their students have lapsed into a particularly low level of motivation, they can pull out a little mug holder thing-gummy (or whatever the item may be) and offer it to first student to answer the next question. Instant motivation.
I actually have at least five or six more ideas on how to get more motivated for this semester, but as you may imagine, I just can’t summon the energy to mention them right now.
Marty Reeder is a senior majoring in history education. Comments or exciting worthless objects can be sent to martr@cc.usu.edu