Why must we be done this way?

You're viewing a single thread.

336 comments

If schools only focused on what students were motivated to learn, I'm not sure schools would really be accomplishing much. Not to say that schools shouldn't foster motivation in students. Just that technology, especially social media, is very effective at distracting people.
- You can increase motivation to learn by making lessons more engaging even if it's a subject they're not personally interested in. But making lessons more interesting and engaging is not easy and we can't expect all teachers to have the skills and resources to do the research and development needed to produce lesson plans that are really interesting. I think it could be improved by putting more money into developing interesting lesson plans centrally and distributing the materials to teachers to follow instead of just producing dry curriculums. Teachers need support.
  
  I have literally built a dungeons and dragons campaign to learn statistics, and had some students on their phones. I'm not a dancing bear, and having a dopamine panic-button makes it near impossible to engage with anything challenging (I struggle with it too and know it's an anxiety crutch, but it's super maladaptive).
  
  I fully support kicking kids off their phones in class, I don't think any lesson no matter how engaging can compete with that. I'm not supposed to be on my phone during meetings, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ban phones from class. I was just commenting that work can be done to make lessons more engaging when phones aren't involved. There's of course a limit to what you can do, and some subjects are just inherently harder to get kids into, like statistics. But seriously good on you for doing that. I'm sure that while it didn't have perfect engagement, it was far better than just teaching it to the book.
  Just curious, is there a place you can share that lesson plan to other teachers? It'd be a shame for all that work you did to not get to be used in other classrooms as well.
  
  But also, screen addiction is very real
  
  Agreed. I'm not defending phones in class, just pointing out that there's more work that can be done with lesson plans as well.
- That aren't motivated and are bored as hell; the average motivation level for schools where I live is a 2.9... out of 10. If kids aren't motivated and they have devices on them, what do you think they would do in class?
  
  They would probably be more likely to stare at their phones instead of learning if they did.
  I do think that having students sit at desks for hours at a time is not an effective way of teaching. Giving students different ways of learning is beneficial and more likely to motivate them. But that usually is more work and more expensive to do.
  In an ideal world, every student would have an individualized, self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher. Unfortunately, that's not the case for nearly any student.
  
  I would be interested to see how a self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher would end up if it was focused on embracing getting sidetracked. I know I've sat through history classes in the past and had semi-unrelated questions I wanted to research or ask about but didn't want to waste people's time. In situations like that I would prefer to have a computer to get a quick answer versus pondering it in the back of my head.
  There must be some truth to an idea that you don't learn as much from an answer from a question you didn't ask.
  
  I had a history teacher in school that liked me even though I barely paid attention in class. I was bored in the class itself, but loved history and would spend the entire period just reading the textbook because I found it interesting. So even though I didn't pay attention I would still ace assignments like nobody else in there.
  I was usually a couple chapters past the class at any given time.
  
  Man, I remember a couple teachers that encouraged randomly asking questions like that, and the whole class was really engaged. It was very rare but an amazing environment to learn in. I feel bad that there's so many people that never got to have those sort of teachers.
  
  It's like the educational equivalent of a gateway drug. Some of the electives I took like programming really encouraged it and that's what kept me interested even afterwards with subpar instructors.
  
  I think at a certain point, you should be able to drop math as a subject and take programming instead. There's no shortage of math concepts in programming that still require understanding of underlying concepts, but I can easily say if I had that option in school, I'd have learned way more in a programming class than I ever did in math.
  
  I mean programming is a way to get someone engaged and to some degree there can be creativity. It would almost be like a more topical and realistic version of a word problem

336 comments