Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: motivation

On Character Building

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m working on creating a character. This is something I’ve done before. That’s not to say I’m an expert at it—just that I’ve done it. Only this time it’s different, because I’m creating a character for myself.

No, I’m not writing a memoir, or a story with a protagonist who’s a thinly-veiled version of myself (at least, not intentionally). I’m also not getting into LARPing.

Fall semester is approaching fast, and six days from now, I’ll be standing in front of a class of twenty-five comp students, most of whom are in their first semester. And I’ll be trying to present a deliberately-crafted version of myself.

I tried that last semester, in a way. My students found me, for the most part, either strict and intimidating … or timid and insecure. Three guesses which of those was a more accurate reading—and there are only two options, so with three guesses, you have no excuse to not get it right eventually.

A professor of mine compared teaching to performing, and I think it’s an interesting analogy. I put on my teacher costume—a blazer, a plain top, nice pants, simple shoes—and get on my teacher stage and use my teacher voice (but sometimes slip and use my normal voice and have students come up to me after class to ask me what I said because it was impossible to hear from the back of the room). But I haven’t really created my teacher character. What does she want?

Some answers that are unacceptable:

  • avenge parents’ murder (doesn’t work when your parents are alive and well)
  • achieve fame (if you can’t handle a twenty-five person audience, the spotlight is not where you want to be)
  • win the big competition (a university teaching award doesn’t count as big)
  • slay the dragon (killing your students, even the mean ones, is frowned upon)
  • get the guy/girl (ditto sleeping with them)

So what does my teacher character want? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I have at least a nugget of what she doesn’t: She doesn’t want to seem intimidating. Avoiding timid would be pretty great, too.

Lions and tigers and … well, just lions, actually.

December 19, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Operant conditioning relies on consequences—punishments and reinforcers—as a means of either decreasing or increasing a subject’s likelihood of repeating a behavior. Punishments decrease; reinforcers increase. Both come in positive and negative—either adding or removing something.

So:

  • You steal my toy, and I punch you, so you’re less likely to steal it again. This is positive punishment.
  • You steal my toy, and I stop talking to you, so you’re less likely to steal it again. This is negative punishment.
  • You share your toy with me, and I share one of mine in return, so you’re more likely to share it again. This is positive reinforcement.
  • You share your toy with me, and I stop whining for you to share it with me, so you’re more likely to share it again. This is negative reinforcement.

I have, you may be able to tell, been thinking a lot about motivation lately.

Here’s the thing. Fear is a powerful motivator. Fear—justified and otherwise—is a driving force in society. Fear is a useful adaptation—it helps us survive. Fear says, “Don’t mess with that lion. It could probably maul you.”

Fear is a product of punishment—either directly or by proxy. I can take a lesson from seeing what happens to a zebra who gets too close to that lion. Fear pushes us to avoid bad things, and that’s a healthy quality.

But fear isn’t enough. Fear may prevent mauling, but it won’t promote greatness. That’s where reinforcers come in.

I see this a lot—in myself and my peers, in writing and work and relationships and life. Fears of failure, of judgment, of rejection—they drive us to seek safety. We write what is least risky. We stay by the trunk, way back from that limb, or maybe out of the tree altogether. All manner of beasts could be loitering up there.

And because of this, we are not great. Fear motivates survival and not much else.

I’ve talked before about motivation through the lens of incentivizing preschoolers, so I’m going to take it back another level (and see how far I can go before being accused of condescending and over-simplifying). A common tenet of dog training is that “positive reinforcement is one of your most powerful tools.” By reinforcing rather than punishing, you show a dog what behaviors you want, rather than leaving him to figure it out by process of elimination. (I’ll let you come up with your own house training joke for that one.)

Punishment motivates fear. Reinforcement motivates desire.

For writers, rejection is in no short supply, even if we’re not submitting work for publication. We can apply to programs or workshops and receive the stock thanks-but-no-thanks that sometimes comes with a note of regret, mentioning the high number of applicants and the limited number of spaces and how many talented writers are being turned away, as if any of these things make the NO any less NO-like. We can share a piece with a reader whose opinion we trust and get a response that is lukewarm only out of consideration for our fragile egos. We can finish a draft and feel good, then return to it two weeks later and find it appalling. Even the most introverted of us are still human, and humans are social beings, and to a social being, rejection is one of the worst punishments out there. (Rejection by other humans, at least. There’s a certain relief in being turned down by the aforementioned lion.)

This, I think, is why it’s so vital for us to find writing intrinsically rewarding, so that it becomes a reinforcer on its own. For all our insecurities, writing requires a degree of arrogance, and it’s one we have to embrace. We have to believe that what we do has value, that when we tell ourselves, “Sit, writer!” and plop down at our desks, we’ll get a Milk Bone of positive reinforcement. Or, if Orwell is right, and “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand,” then perhaps we’ll receive negative reinforcement in the form of some relief, however momentary, from that demon.

(Note: One could mistake this for positive punishment, in that the demon punishes a lack of writing, but operant conditioning deals with the consequences of actions, not inaction.)

Either way, if we work from a place of fear, we may survive—it’s not guaranteed, but it’s the best we can hope for; if we act from desire, we’re not guaranteed success, but at least we’ve got a chance at it.

On College Writing (by way of preschoolers)

August 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This is cross-posted (with slight variation) on my brand new temporary side blog, I have an office. I’m keeping it as a place to process my learning-to-be-a-teacher thoughts, and I might draw from it now and then if I have a thought that comes together well.

A few days ago, I started How Learning Works, and it brings up a lot of principles from my undergrad psychology studies. The third chapter in particular makes me think of a psychology class I had my last semester of undergrad, which was actually called Learning. It was behavioral psychology learning, not education learning, but a huge chunk of behavioral psychology is operant conditioning—all about shaping behavior with consequences. And this is where motivation comes in.

Take the different forms of value, for instance. Intrinsic value, my psych professor asserted, rarely comes out of nowhere—there’s almost always something that precedes it. Example: most pianists who play because of the intrinsic value they find in it didn’t just decide, out of the blue, that this pursuit was valuable. The closest jump would be that boredom/curiosity/etc. gave value to exploring the environment, and the piano that happened to be there had instrumental value (get it?) as a way to alleviate boredom/satiate curiosity. Only then can the piano take on its own value. But that often isn’t the case. A lot of pianists had piano lessons as a kid, something selected—and incentivized—by the parent.

Nothing is intrinsically intrinsically valuable, short of basic life needs. Intrinsic value develops with time—sometimes quickly, sometimes not.

Here, though, is the twist: we have to be careful how we reward things. There are risks involved. Lepper, Green, and Nisbett did a study in 1973 with preschool kids—not exactly a college writing class, I know, but bear with me.

So one day, you sit down three groups of kids with markers and tell them to draw. You tell the first group they’ll get a reward at the end for drawing; you surprise the second group with a reward; and the third group gets no reward. Three days later, you reconvene the groups and set them in a playroom with, among other things, markers and paper. Do you see a change in the rate of drawing?

Yes. But it’s complicated.

What typically gets reported when the study is cited is that the group that got no reward had higher rates of drawing than the group that was told they’d get a reward. This means, people will say, that extrinsic reward actually undermines motivation. (It’s the whole, I love writing, so if I got paid to do it, it would be ruined! sort of thinking.)

Except you had three groups, remember? And the group of kids that got a surprise reward drew just as much as the group that got no reward. So this means that extrinsic reward has no effect, then? No, not that either.

With a little probing into these kids’ histories, you can break them down into “low-base-rate” and “high-base-rate” drawers—i.e., kids who, left to their own devices, didn’t draw much, and kids who did. The group with no reward saw no change to either group. The group with the surprise reward saw a higher rate in the low-base-rate kids, as did the group with the expected reward. But that group saw a drop in high-base-rate kids.

Why might that possibly be?

Here’s an analogy. I could say, “Want to help me with Project A?” Or I could say, “Want to help me with Project B? I’ll give you five bucks.” While the five dollars is a nice offer, it also might—reasonably—lead you to suspect that there’s something unpleasant about Project B. You go in with the assumption that this is a trade—that you’re taking a loss (your effort) in exchange for a gain (five dollars), as am I (reversed). By offering you the money ahead of time, I’ve framed it as a chore, and since I’m having to add extrinsic value to the equation, Project B must not have intrinsic value.

And that’s the tricky thing with incentives. (Well, one of them.) A lot of people don’t come into a writing class finding writing intrinsically valuable. But lumping on simple extrinsic value isn’t necessarily the best way to resolve that.

I met with my mentor Friday, along with her other mentee. He asked about creating student interest in the class, and it’s a good question—particularly with a class like this. It’s not just that they need a 300-level lit class and they picked the one that looked best; it’s that they need this specific composition class—there’s no element of choice involved, except “Now or later?”

The first thing, our mentor said, is to get them arguing with one another.

Which, when she said it, made perfect sense. These students might not find intrinsic value in writing, but who doesn’t find intrinsic value in being right—in being recognized as being right? Start off there, and writing becomes instrumentally valuable, but not in a way tied to an unrelated reward—in a way that’s organically connected to a reward. Writing isn’t a chore you complete to get a grade; it’s a tool for demonstrating how deliciously right you are.

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