Action-Ed’s “Making Education Meaningful” Blog

I start my courses by asking my students the title question. Even when I teach literature or government and economics and history and entrepreneurship … I place huge emphasis on this question. And if I taught math or gym or wood work or basket weaving, I would still place huge emphasis on this question.

Why?

Because my course is about my students, not me.  We all teach because there are people – and often very young and inexperienced little people who have their whole lives ahead of them – who need to learn things from us. Teaching is about our students.

Teaching is not about us.

Teaching is not about our love for our subjects.

Teaching is not about passing or failing or percentages and letter grades.

Real teaching – and I mean the best kind of teaching – is about inspiring our students to become more than they are. To motivate our students to challenge themselves and push themselves harder. To actualize their hidden potential.

But this is the problem. Why would anyone work hard and challenge themselves if they had no sense of where they were headed? They wouldn’t. There would be nothing to work towards.

And this is what I realized in my eighth year of teaching: My course did not matter unless it mattered to my students! “If I cannot make this course meaningful for my students,” I asked myself, “Am I fulfilling my duties as their educator? What does it say about me as a teacher if I cannot help my students understand how this course might relate to their own lives and ambitions?” I really believe that when educators ask themselves questions like these ones, the results can be remarkable. It puts our reason for being into perspective. It makes things clearer. It gives us courage to do things differently. It helps us focus our energies. It helps us make our students’ educational experience with us more meaningful.

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COURSE INTRODUCTION + WHERE ARE YOU GOING IN LIFE?

So here’s how I introduce my courses while trying to simultaneously answer these questions. It’s an oversimplification and I’m certain that it’s not the best answer, but I thought it would be fitting to share what I do on this first day of 2009 … a day when many of us are asking what we want out of this new year.

1. Introduce myself, my course, grading weights, yada yada yada. Side Notes: Do any of us really take the first day of classes seriously? What’s really the point of the typical introduction?  It’s kind of like a bunch of wolves sniffing one another, marking territory, and getting an intuitive sense of who’s who and what’s to come. I challenge every educator to make their course introduction more meaningful than the typical one. Think about whether or not your course intro is any different than a bunch of pack animals sniffing one another and marking territory.

2. Draw a 100 year line across the board. I would always start the 100 year line so that the date of birth of the oldest looking student would be showing (e.g. 1989), and then indicate where every ten years would be on the line. E.g. 1991—-2001—-2011– … –2091. I would make my students create their own version of this line too. I would mark an “x” on the current year (e.g. 2009) and say, “We are here.” And then I would ask my students, “Where on this line would you like to die?” Some would ask, “Uh, what does this have to do with civics, or economics, or entrepreneurship?” And I would reply, “It has everything to do with you being in this civics, economics, or entrepreneurship course,” because it does. Understanding and feeling the finiteness of our lives helps instill a sense of urgency. And urgency helps motivate us to do a bit more than we would otherwise.

3. Students mark their ages and life-predictions on the ten-year intervals. Then I would ask my students to indicate how old they would be on each of the ten year intervals. E.g. 0 yrs in 1991, 10 yrs. in 2001, etc. Then, I would ask them – if they could imagine their dream life – to write what kind of day they would be waking up to in each of the ten year intervals, in two sentences or less. Who would they be? What would they be doing? Who would be in their lives? Why? Etc. Then, after a few minutes I would interrupt them and move to step 4.

4. Ask them, “How can this course help you achieve your dreams?” This step is the whole point of the exercise. I wanted my students to start thinking about where they wanted to go and who they wanted to become. I wanted them to want something really, really bad. I wanted them to get excited about that dream life of theirs … excited enough that they might even be willing to consider working hard for it. And I wanted them to realize that their experience in my course was part of that journey. And I would tell them that this course would likely not be a big part of their path forward, but a part nonetheless. I wanted them to understand where it fit into their own grand scheme of things.

5. First Homework Assignment. And after making points like this and many others, I would make steps 3 and 4 their first homework assignment. They would have the rest of the class to think about what their dream life would look like in 10 year snapshots. They would have the rest of the class to review my course outline to see how the content might relate to their future path and future needs. And this whole process, assuming they took it seriously (which most did), was an exercise in making my course more meaningful for them! It was about them constructing their own purpose and defining what they wanted out of my course.

And it worked!