RE: Unit 6 Learning Activity 1 by Christina

Hi Christina,

Great blog post, I thought this post was well-thought out and engaging and I just wanted to respond to your question about lacking in the motivational principles of andragogy to complete a task. Rather than talk about completing a task, I’ll quickly summarize how lacking the last principle of andragogy for me made me regret not being able to maximize my educational experience from high school onwards.

As an adult learner, I can personally say that all the assumptions of adult learners in andragogy are true with me. I’ve come to love and appreciate the process of learning more so now then when I was in high school or in my early years of university. Back then, I was truly motivated to learn only from external motivators such as to find decent job prospects or to avoid disappointing my family. As a result, I only strived to earn what I felt was an acceptable grade which hindered my experience as a learner.

One of the things that really made me appreciative of the general learning process was when I started to notice how my profs were applying classroom theories to real-world problems. I felt that learning without knowing why I was learning had always been a challenge for me growing up. I can vividly remember struggling with sine, cosine, and tangents for geometry in my grade 12 math class and constantly asking myself: “Why am I learning these complicated equations? I’m never going to use this in the future. Normal, everyday people don’t solve these problems!” Ultimately, I never bothered exerting myself to learn the material, something I deeply regretted years later.

My disdain for math lasted until about my 3rd year of university when I watched and became fascinated with the movie “Imitation Game” which was about how a mathematician named Alan Turing helped end World War II through his invention of the early computer. This was one of the key moments that made me realize how powerful knowledge can be and sparked my appreciation for mathematics as I began to realize how it’s been practically used to explain everything in our physical world. Merriam & Bierma (2014) described it best when they stated “adults need to know the reason for learning something,” something I found relatable even before I reached adulthood (as cited by Penfold Navarro, 2018). I needed to see the big picture in learning these foundational materials before committing to learning them.

I’m sure many younger students share the same sentiment as I did growing up and placed learning on the back burner to pursue their passions like basketball, football, music, or video games. I think many of these students can come to appreciate the learning process just as I did if educators are able to connect the educational material to their personal interests at a deeper level and hopefully spark an interest in the material itself. For example, as a basketball player in high school I would’ve loved to know statistically which areas on court were the most valuable to shoot from or how to optimize shooting technique based on our individual biomechanics. Had I been able to connect my passions with my educational material back then, my educational experience and specializations would have likely been drastically different.

-Ruiz