What is Passion?

Is it possible to build passion by using a few tools?

“I play volleyball because I am passionate about it”, my son says. Lately he picked up this interest in volleyball where he finds ways of bouncing the ball on the wall every opportunity that he gets. In fact he makes time for it even on very busy days. It is not the same for any other activity. He does only enough or as much as told without feeling the need to do more. So maybe this is passion - when you are gravitated to do something more even when others feel you have met your needs just because it makes you happy.

How does this start? How do we become passionate about something and not passionate about others? Now that I have started my venture into becoming a high school teacher, I am really interested to know if there are tools that I can include into my teaching which can bring in that passion for the kids towards the topics I teach.

From the past 2 years, I have been observing kids of all ages while they learn different topics and apply them. I have seen 4 groups of kids:

Absent - These kids are both physically and/or mentally absent during both the meetings/discussions and during the hands-on experiments.
Fear of missing out - These kids are present during most of the meetings and experiments and also do what is told but that is where they stop.
Interested - These kids are not only present but also do things on their own. They don’t need to be told what experiment they have to do next. They are ready to plan the experiments and doing some extra reading to understand and implement a topic. But they stay within the boundaries of a set project.
Passionate - These kids do everything the interested kids do and also bring in ideas to start new sub-projects and start working on different aspects. They love spending more time and going that extra mile.

I can see that getting a reward , whether internal or external can cause a motivation and hence create a cycle which results in spending more and more time to stay with the skill. Is passion a result of just the right reward at the right time? If so, how can a teacher make sure that is happening? Is there anything else which matters? Here are a few factors which I feel might play a role:

Time: Over the period, I have seen kids move from category 1 to category 4 just by giving more time. I once heard someone say - “Stay with a problem and the answer comes to you”. If you are able to give that undivided time to something then you tend to get some aha moments which give you immense satisfaction.

Creating obstacles that count: We hear people talking about how we should enjoy the process and not just wait for the end goal to celebrate. Timely performances, tests, sports matches can be those timely highs which can act as some obstacles which can induce the sense of enjoying the process but these can sometimes also become a source of stress which can lead to loosing interest. The way they are structured might be more important. My kids were given a project to make sure an egg lands on the ground from a 2-story building without breaking. On competition day, it was almost a fun gala with no one worrying or stressing about the grade but during the process they learnt about so many different concepts including different materials and their properties, laws of physics, etc. They had fun learning and they still got their rewards as internal joy.

Reward externally till one does not need it anymore: Any new skill is hard to pick up. My daughter would cry every time she had to go to dance class. My mom told me that I used to do that too. I can imagine a 5 year old not wanting to go through the physical strain of dance for a continues one hour. Taking it one day at a time and rewarding every hour with something that counted (even as small as a chocolate) made a huge difference because the body gets used to the physical strain very soon and then after a few classes the chocolate was not required anymore.

What has your journey of being passionate been like? What tools worked for you?