Fostering Student Motivation

hi everyone
as our assessed teaching has finished, GEÇMİŞ OLSUN everbody;) I think everybody tried to do the best teaching:)) Anyway, I won't talk about assessed. The thing which attracted my attention in my asessed teaching was that to motivate each learner throughout the whole lesson is really hard work for a teacher. As teachers, we cannot expect that each student in the class would be motivated all the time during the 40 minutes!!! So I have searched for some information about motivation issue. A small list has occured which includes some important clues for student motivation.I also added some of them from my own observation during my practice teaching:

• choose topic from students' own life (real life situations)
• praise whenever they achieve something
• be a model for them as being enthusiastic and interested in learning
• use humor
• try to appeal to all intelligences througout the lesson
• include novelty/variety materials
• don't make your students sit and listen passively
• use drama, games
• allow students to create finished products
• involve distracted students in the lesson by asking question which is simple for them to answer

what else can be added to this list? we shouldn't forget that students motivation is one of the most essentail issue to have effective teaching-learning atmosphere.Let's find another clues to motivate our students. Would you please add the other items which you know? What are the other items to be involved in this list?

"TEACHER=GARDENER" Let's find metaphors for "teacher" ;)

Every job requires dealing with somethings related to itself. For instance, an officer in a bank is engaged in money issues; an engineer works with measurement of places;a green-grocer sells fruit and vegetables... What about teachers??? Yes, students are the center of our job as teachers. But the different thing from the other jobs is that our center is HUMAN. In that sense, as teachers, we cannot just deal with them by just trying to teaching in the classroom. As the students are not machines but "human", we must take into considiration of their needs, interests, moods, social backgrounds because with the lack of knowledge about the students, we cannot have the comfortable atmosphere of teaching. As teachers, we should not forget that our students are not paper, not machine, not computer but only HUMAN. With this view, I want to share my imagination that I see teachers like "gardener" who wants to grow flowers so s/he has the knowledge abot the flowers such as which place they like, how much water they need, when and how they bloom. So "teacher" means "gardener" to me. What about you?? Which occupation are teachers like for you? What does "teacher" mean to you?Let's find metaphors for "being a teacher" all together;))