Motivation by Tony Gurr

I was initially skeptical about Tony Gurr's unique blog post. I have grown accustomed to the "traditional" style of blogging that most of my classmates use: mostly text, with the occasional link or picture thrown in. However, this blog post on Motivation was extremely interesting, and captured my attention right away!

Normally, I find that too many graphics/images in a blog post comes across as crowded, messy, and actually ends up distracting the reader from the original message. This was not the case with Tony Gurr's post, though! It took a while, but after reading the post over multiple times, I felt like I had a good understanding of what he was trying to say, and the points he was trying to make. Basically, his main ideas were that kids generally learn best from people they like and respect, and they also tend to thrive in an environment where they get to learn from a variety of sources and styles. I wholeheartedly agree with these points; Personally, I find myself genuinely wanting to do well in school, not only due to self motivation, but also because I respect certain teachers. Also, I dislike doing repetitive types of schoolwork (e.g. copying notes from the board), and prefer a less rigid and more varied style of teaching. I find that I am more motivated to study harder in those types of classrooms!

Tony Gurr also mentions (via picture) that "Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are that it will burn very briefly." This, too, is something I can relate to very well. An example would be the Genius Hour Passion projects our class is doing right now. I find these projects to be a lot more engaging and intriguing when we get to create our own criteria and choose our own topics, as opposed to having the project outlined and pre-planned for us. We are motivating ourselves and keeping ourselves on track because we enjoy doing the projects, not because we have to!

I was very impressed about the fact that Tony took the time to design and create ALL of his graphics! Each of the images relate well to the message and theme of Motivation, and all of them show considerable thought and effort given into making each one. They are all very effective visuals to the point where the text seems to be supporting the pictures, instead of the other way around! I really enjoyed this blog post and feel, well, motivated, to make my own blog posts more interesting and engaging in the future!