My One Word

Motivation.

I’m a petite skinny woman if you look at the scale. I get the rolling eyes and the “shut ups” when I tell others I need to start working out. They just don’t understand that someone like me can in fact be unhealthy. I don’t have much strength and I’m out of breath going up a flight of stairs. The term "skinny fat" is an actual thing if you look it up. So this year I decided to join the gym. I’m lucky enough that my boyfriend is a personal trainer and he’s been helping me on this new journey of becoming healthier and stronger. What motivates me? The high fat percentage I found out I had, the way my mid- section feels, family history of high blood pressure and diabetes, and the fact that I’m in my 30’s and hope to have children one day. It’s never been easy for me to get up and go exercise. I don’t like physical activity and I much rather lay around and watch some TV, but I’m determined to stay motivated so that I can live a healthier life.

We are all motivated by so many different things. Its easy for me to get motivated about the things I want to achieve in life. But just as quickly as I can get motivated, I can get unmotivated and fail to be proactive. I once heard a speech about motivation, and he said that when you want something as bad as you’d want to breathe then you’d be successful and achieve your goals. So I ask myself, how bad do I want these different desires and goals of mine? I must stay motivated.

As a dyslexia interventionist this year, I work with students with learning disabilities that include dyslexia and students who only have dyslexia. I can see how much more the students with learning disabilities struggle. I have 4^th and 5^th graders who absolutely hate having to come to their intervention with me.  I have 7^th graders who seem like they have already given up on school and all they care to do is play their games on their phones. My goal this year is to find a way to motivate these students to want to learn to read, write and spell correctly and keep them motivated. Every day I try to remind them about the importance of reading and how they’ll need it for the future so that they are successful adults. In our secondary schools, not only students who have dyslexia dislike to read or are unmotivated. Students who can read are also unmotivated in school. It’s our job as educators to provide these students with experiences and lessons that will motivate them to read more and learn and always have that desire to learn something new.

There are so many things that I want for myself and my future and thinking about how badly I want those things is how I hope to stay motivated. I hope to keep that word in mind when I’m with my students and can only hope that I am a daily motivator for them and encourage them not to give up on themselves and show them that there is hope for them if they put in the effort and stay motivated by keeping their end goal in mind.