Motivating middle school aged students is very difficult seems to be a very challenging for a teacher. You have to really know your students and what they are interested in. It helps knowing their favorite kinds of music and tv shows also so you can find something somewhat related to that and turn into something educational.
I mostly work with students who have reading comprehension and fluency difficulties and getting them to read and enjoy reading is a very difficult task. We tend to avoid the things we are not good at, and my students really try to avoid reading because it is so hard for them. Finding something students like to read about helps with their motivation. For instance, there is a boy in my reading intervention class who loves anything that has to do with building cars and other vehicles, so my teacher ordered a magazine subscription about cars and he was very interested in reading the articles in there. He was so interested that he wanted to read to actually read and practice his fluency and comprehension.
Another way to motivate students is to get them to teach you something they are good at in school. You really know you have mastered something when you can teach it to someone else. A student I work with one-on-one with fluency skills and math enrichment really gets frustrated and shuts down easily when he is having trouble with reading. I can relate to his frustration when it comes to math, but it turns out math is his strength. He is learning about multiplying and factoring trinomials and I had to be honest with him, I did not understand it. So, my teacher and I had him teach us how to do it because he thought it was "really easy". I think it made him feel good about himself that he knew he was good at something that others have a hard time with.
I agree that middle level students are in a difficult stage in their lives, where they are not intrinsically motivated and it can be difficult to motivate them. They are at that point where they look like adults and they should know what they need to do, but they are still very immature inside. The only good thing about that is they want to be cool and deep down want to make the teacher happy. If you can find a way to make them feel special, they'll do anything for you. It is really helpful to find out what they like and let them talk about it or learn more about it. I try to make connections in class from content to what students are interested in outside of school (I related percent change and wholesale to Pawn Stars the other day!) which made the content more relevant.
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