Learning motivation – Why no student is ‘lazy’
Dr Devon Price tells Gordon Cairns why calling students ‘lazy’ isn’t just inaccurate, but likely to make motivation issues even worse…
When my physics teacher nicknamed me ‘Inertia’, he wasn’t making a teaching point about bodies at rest and in motion.
His colleagues were less subtle. From starting primary to leaving secondary, I was frequently told I was a ‘lazy boy’, both verbally and in report cards, and naturally believed this to be true. It was only decades later, when I was working three jobs, that I realised that despite still carrying the label with me, I wasn’t actually a lazy person.
Achieving the reverse
Teaching approaches may have become more nuanced in the intervening years – you won’t find the descriptor ‘lazy’ on modern report cards – but the ‘L’ word can still characterise the way some teachers think about their students, and affect how focused they’ll be in their support for certain individuals.
Unsurprisingly, calling a student ‘lazy’ doesn’t tend to kickstart them into action. It can, however, achieve the reverse; reinforcing a student’s negative mindset and providing them with an excuse to not engage.
Laziness is a judgement, not a diagnosis. There’s no legitimate psychological construct known as laziness. It’s rather a catch-all term used to describe a range of barriers to learning, typically stemming from myriad causes – from lack of motivation or fear of failure at one end of the scale, to problematic eating habits or sleep deprivation at the other.
Judging and shaming
Social psychologist Dr Devon Price has attempted to firmly put the laziness myth to bed by arguing, “No person would knowingly choose to lack the motivation to carry through a task that they actually care about.”
Instead, he offers an alternative explanation: “What gets called laziness is either a person determining for themselves that a goal is not feasible or worthwhile for them in that moment, or it’s a person repeatedly failing to meet a goal that they do care deeply about because they are dealing with too much, and receiving far too little support.”
Dr Price went so far as to write a 2021 book on the subject, Laziness does not Exist: A Defence of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked. In his view, “We can disagree with other people’s choices and priorities, and as teachers we can try to persuade them to be motivated in the directions that we believe matter. But if a person is carrying too heavy a load, and no one is there to offer them a hand, judging or shaming them into doing more will always be impossible.”
Unwitting influence
What teachers think about their students really matters. As Dr Price points out, “Even when students are very young, their teachers begin to pigeonhole them into various roles – the teacher’s pet, the smart one who doesn’t need any help, the lazy slacker, the daydreamer – and this has been shown to influence how often the teacher checks in with a student, what strategies they use to prompt them when they’re stuck, even the emotions they express toward a student and tone of voice they use.”
As teachers, we have a demonstrably important role in our students lives and can unwittingly influence them – yet our role should encompass more than simply trying to be non-judgemental. Instead, we can use our own experiences as successful learners to support them.
According to Dr Price, “For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness.” From this perspecive, failure to begin a given task is recast as problem that teachers should be able to help with.
“The barrier is that procrastinators have executive functioning challenges,” Dr Price continues. “They struggle to divide a large responsibility into a series of discrete, specific and ordered tasks. When faced with a major, massive project, most people will want advice on how to divide it into smaller tasks, and a timeline for completion. To track progress, most people will require organisational tools, such as a to-do list, calendar, datebook or syllabus.”
Unidentified barriers
In his experience as a professor at Loyola University, Chicago, the issues that most commonly cause students to be mislabelled as lazy relate to external barriers or personal struggles that prevent them from prioritising their classes.
He further notes that mental health issues can be mislabelled, rather than helped by a teacher’s personal belief in the power of motivation. “People with ADHD and depression very commonly get misperceived as lazy, because the additional supports they need to initiate a task and stick with it are simply not present in most educational environments. As educators, we’re often conditioned to believe that motivation and drive can do everything.”
Moreover, when an educator expresses their opinion as to why a student isn’t engaging, this lack of engagement can be exacerbated. As Price explains, “Calling a person ‘lazy’ is a curiosity-terminating action. In nearly all cases, what we commonly regard as signs of ‘laziness’ are really just evidence that a person is facing a barrier we are either unaware of, or don’t recognise as legitimate.
“Instead of giving up on someone because we don’t understand their challenges, we need to get curious, and humble – because we never know the full extent of what another person is carrying.”
Horror stories
From talking to Price, I’ve come to realise that my own experience as an adult carrying the ‘laziness stigma’, isn’t unique: “In the numerous interviews I’ve conducted for my book, I’ve been staggered by the horror stories people have shared with me of the cruel, dismissive things teachers have said to them about their supposed ‘laziness’, and the years of self-doubt and disengagement that can often result.”
He recalls encounters with adult learners who have experienced a form of ‘foundational educational trauma’, often caused by an insensitive teacher. “Shame blocks motivation and help-seeking,” Price says. “It can even convince a person that they don’t deserve to pursue an education, or ask for help.
“In both the long and the short term, we see that judgements of laziness lead to students checking out, feeling less capable, reporting lower self-esteem, and feeling passive and helpless, because experience has taught them they can’t trust others to offer assistance, or care what they’re going through.”
He also makes a point of offering teachers some much-needed perspective. “We need to remember that our classes are not the centre of our students’ universes.
If they aren’t prioritizing our courses, it may be because they’re facing far more pressing difficulties, and the student has made the logical calculation that the class isn’t the foremost place to be investing their limited energy and time.
“When that’s the case, we really need to get honest with ourselves as instructors, and ask what we can do to make our courses more valuable to people who already have much bigger problems than trying to earn a high grade.”
Indeed, if laziness exists anywhere, it’s perhaps when the term is applied by teachers to students, putting the onus on them to change – instead of digging deeper and helping them overcome this barrier to their learning.
Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications
