I’ve been teaching for over 20 years, and I love what I do. But I also feel our system is broken.
What’s wrong with it?
It’s not real. So much of school is contrived examples to make teaching easier, or just purely academic with no application at all.
That’s awful for student motivation. As adults, we all get more excited about learning things when there’s a reason to learn it. Why would kids be any different?
We can do better. I’ve always gone above and beyond to include real-life applications in my math classes – how to buy a car, do taxes, tip a server, fix a budget, and on and on.
But personally, I’ve also had a lot of life experiences that have taught me which parts of school’s classess are useful – and which are not.
Take for example imaginary numbers from math – that’s what you get when you take the square root of a negative number. It’s often taught over 1-2 weeks of Algebra 2 class, but amazingly its only application is for electrical engineers working on AC power systems. That’s it.
There are many examples like this, yet many will say that there’s just not enough time to bring real-world applications into a course. I don’t buy it. Re-allocating class time toward the most useful and beneficial topics would be a great first step.
Further, how much time do we spend trying to keep kids engaged? Re-explaining because someone wasn’t paying attention? Doing extra work because no one does the assigned reading?
Motivated students don’t have these problems. With motivated students, the learning almost drives itself the students are so interested. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see kids as driven to learn academics as they are to figure out how Instagram works? It’s amazing how well they can master phones and social media, isn’t it?
There is NO reason that school can’t be this way. And I want to make it happen.