Thursday, January 29, 2009

Motivational metric

There have been a number of metrics being devised since Drug Monkey revived the establish your own scientific eponym meme. I bounced a few around in my head, but was embroiled in grant-related issues at the time and never got around to putting any down. In the past couple of days I have spent a lot of time tinkering with the structure of my course and putting some lectures together. As I am putting the finishing touches on some of them, it's been pretty clear that I have created a motivation metric, without having to think about it. It's simple and direct. The motivation I have to get parts of a lecture done are inversely proportional to the amount of challenge I find in the subject. Therefore, when I am teaching something a little out of my comfort zone, I focus on getting the slides together in a very organized way to get my point across clearly. If the topic is something I am very comfortable with, I leave the slides blank while I do things like blog about why I'm not actually doing the work I need to finish.
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2 comments:

  1. DamnGoodTechnicianJanuary 29, 2009 at 2:35 PM

    I think this can be extended to many tasks - the greater the challenge (for example, designing experiments to test out a new idea, using a sweet new piece of equipment you just unpacked), the greater the desire to do it; the lesser the challenge (for example, filling out administrative paperwork, updating one's lab notebook), the lesser the desire to do it.

    Case in point: I am putting off my lab notebook to make pithy comments on other people's blogs.

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  2. Professor in TrainingJanuary 29, 2009 at 3:49 PM

    At the moment, my motivation to get lectures written seems to be directly proportional to the amount of interest I have in the subject ... I'm flying through the ones that I'm most comfortable with and avoiding others like the plague.

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