### You are viewing a page indexed by search engine. All comments on the topic are put together without order and may be confusing to read. To see organized discussion click here. ###

it is important to teach why math works, not just raw formulas, the key is to teach proofs and theory without hours and hours of grinding them out which ruins the learning experience of it all. challenge the students to learn why. As a student that transferred to a public school I was the only on that could derive formulas yet I failed many tests because I couldn't memorize them.Whenever homework is incredibly short (5 problems or something) people shrug it off, and don't do it. Then again, too long and people just won't do it because its too "impossible". My physics teacher didn't collect homework, but went over it and we were instructed to use red pens to correct and take notes. Then we handed all the work from the unit in a folder before a test and it was graded for participation. Maybe a perfect folder can get a free point/two on tests too? Hope that helps.Love But the question here is motivation in a college, not in the elementary school.

That means that you and few other students were motivated in the fifth grade. The question is, how to motivate other students in the class? Were they also good at physics?

Actually, I remember that in elementary school, I knew physics the best in the 5th grade when a teacher would give harder problems to few of us who were interested in solving them. I don't remember that I was doing any homeworks back then. Later, I had different teacher, and I did do homeworks, but because class assignments were the same for everyone, I didn't know physics very well. If I knew a specific homework problem, I could give a specific answer to a question. We can motivate students by explaining how they can benefit from the knowledge gained by solving homework problems; by explaining possible applications of the skills acquired; by providing homeworks that relate to the problems they are interested in, and that touch their lives. We can explain why people started asking those questions and problems at the first place; who and why discovered mathematical theory in question. I'm a remedial math teacher in a college looking for ways to get students to actually do homework. How can we motivate them? They keep failing until they realize that the only way is to do the work. Some take the same class 4X before they get that!