Initiating Interest

       From reading ZAMM and discussing it in class I have begun to pay extra attention to the influence of interest in educational institutions. Persig looks at interest as a factor of how well the student will gain knowledge and possibly receive desired grades, but he has yet to explain what factors influence interest. As I have not yet finished the novel, I do not know if he will delve into this topic, but I have started drawing my own conclusions based on personal experience. A comment from Dr. Clark during our class discussion took me off guard; he mentioned that one of the problems of needing interest in order to gain knowledge is that we cannot force ourselves to be interested in something. This caused me to start thinking about what influences my interest in a class. Why am I more drawn to one subject over another? One of the first things that popped into my head was that I am more interested in the subjects in which I am more successful. In these subjects I can continue to learn and move forward and go deeper, as, with subjects that I am unsuccessful in, I feel that I am stuck in one place and do not move backwards or forwards. This stagnant position is not appealing and I quickly lose any interest that I may have once had. There are also many changing effects to my daily interest in a certain subject. These interests could be triggered or hindered by: 

• outside conversations pertaining to the subject that change my perception of it
  
• the feelings that I have toward the integrity or character of my professor
  
• the people that are in the class (maybe friends that distract me from the subject, therefore, changing what I take away from the class)
  
• the amount of caffeine I intake before the class/the amount of sleep I have had
  
• past experiences with this subject or teachers that I relate to it
  
• what time and on what day of the week the class is scheduled
  
• how relevant I think the subject is to my daily life....
  

The list goes on and on. One thing that I notice is that many of these factors are manageable. Therefore, we should be able to change them in a way that, instead of hindering, they will trigger our interest in the subject. This makes me question Dr. Clarks statement that we cannot force interest on a subject, but then I have to ask why I would be changing those factors in the first place. If I changed things so that I would be more interested in the subject, what, if not interest, would drive me to change those factors? And this is where my interest in philosophy starts to scare me because I know I could think about this forever and never really get anywhere.