Why do I Need to Learn This?
“Why do I need to learn this stuff? When am I ever
going to use this?” Who hasn’t asked it?
As an eighth grade English teacher, and therefore grammar teacher, I was daily
and painfully aware of the fact that the typical adolescent cannot project much
past what they want for dinner, let alone why grammar might be their best
friend someday. It’s just not in the DNA yet.
This is, of course, an overgeneralization. There are some teenagers who are keenly focused on their future. There are also some young adults who can hardly think forward to lunch, let alone dinner. This ability to plan ahead, think about the future, and act on that plan can have a cultural as well as a personal component. The fact that we are just beginning to change culturally to become a nation of savers rather than spenders is a good example. There is a cultural component to what we find to be relevant.
Can teenagers understand why grammar might be useful to them someday? Would a seven year-old ever choose memorizing the multiplication tables at free-choice time? Would a six year-old choose phonics instruction over block building on the carpet? No, no and no, usually. But do they need these skills? Yes, yes and yes. People who argue that they don’t are wrong.
As adults, we are the ones who have developed the ability to project and plan ahead for our future survival. There are times when we, as the adults and teachers, will need to either ignore or attempt to artificially create a need-to-know in the child or student. As a teacher, we can do one of three things. We can (1) ignore their natural curiosities and need-to-knows, (2) create a need-to-know by tapping into existing need-to-knows (3) harness their natural capacities for exploration. In my own practice, I have done all three. Let’s look at all three scenarios in depth through the lens of modern neuroscience.
Is it ever appropriate to ignore a child’s natural curiosity and need-to-know? You bet! That hot pot on the stove and the deep end of the pool are two great examples. As soon as they can reach it, children will pull that hot pot down on themselves if they have not received direct instruction on why that would be a bad idea. “It’s bubbling, it’s steaming, it smells good, I can feel the heat coming off it, I want to see what’s up there!” We have multimodal stimulation at its best here! Our senses are firing on all five cylinders: smell, sight, taste, touch and sound. Similarly, the deep end of the pool looks like worlds of fun. “I don’t care that I can’t swim yet; I want to go there!” You would never feel guilty as a parent for cutting short those precious natural curiosities, would you? No, you would not. You would most likely gently slap your child in the hand the first time they came near that pot, and you would enroll your child in swim lessons in which they cry and protest the first time the instructor throws them in the pool and has them struggle to reach the end.
Teachers have to do the same thing. We need to provide your child with the tools they will need to survive in this world even when they cannot possibly perceive that they will need those tools someday in the future. These tools involve both content and process skills. There is an appropriate time to ignore students’ need-to-knows and provide both content and process skills delivery that were never student-generated and may not even be pleasing in the moment. Consider the case of the student who would far prefer to work alone or who dreads speaking in public. We must suspend support of their natural proclivities to help move them forward in the direction of their fears. But what about attention? If modern neuroscience teaches us that we do not attend to that which we find boring or irrelevant, how can we say that we are not just spinning our wheels by doing so?
This is, of course, an overgeneralization. There are some teenagers who are keenly focused on their future. There are also some young adults who can hardly think forward to lunch, let alone dinner. This ability to plan ahead, think about the future, and act on that plan can have a cultural as well as a personal component. The fact that we are just beginning to change culturally to become a nation of savers rather than spenders is a good example. There is a cultural component to what we find to be relevant.
Can teenagers understand why grammar might be useful to them someday? Would a seven year-old ever choose memorizing the multiplication tables at free-choice time? Would a six year-old choose phonics instruction over block building on the carpet? No, no and no, usually. But do they need these skills? Yes, yes and yes. People who argue that they don’t are wrong.
As adults, we are the ones who have developed the ability to project and plan ahead for our future survival. There are times when we, as the adults and teachers, will need to either ignore or attempt to artificially create a need-to-know in the child or student. As a teacher, we can do one of three things. We can (1) ignore their natural curiosities and need-to-knows, (2) create a need-to-know by tapping into existing need-to-knows (3) harness their natural capacities for exploration. In my own practice, I have done all three. Let’s look at all three scenarios in depth through the lens of modern neuroscience.
Is it ever appropriate to ignore a child’s natural curiosity and need-to-know? You bet! That hot pot on the stove and the deep end of the pool are two great examples. As soon as they can reach it, children will pull that hot pot down on themselves if they have not received direct instruction on why that would be a bad idea. “It’s bubbling, it’s steaming, it smells good, I can feel the heat coming off it, I want to see what’s up there!” We have multimodal stimulation at its best here! Our senses are firing on all five cylinders: smell, sight, taste, touch and sound. Similarly, the deep end of the pool looks like worlds of fun. “I don’t care that I can’t swim yet; I want to go there!” You would never feel guilty as a parent for cutting short those precious natural curiosities, would you? No, you would not. You would most likely gently slap your child in the hand the first time they came near that pot, and you would enroll your child in swim lessons in which they cry and protest the first time the instructor throws them in the pool and has them struggle to reach the end.
Teachers have to do the same thing. We need to provide your child with the tools they will need to survive in this world even when they cannot possibly perceive that they will need those tools someday in the future. These tools involve both content and process skills. There is an appropriate time to ignore students’ need-to-knows and provide both content and process skills delivery that were never student-generated and may not even be pleasing in the moment. Consider the case of the student who would far prefer to work alone or who dreads speaking in public. We must suspend support of their natural proclivities to help move them forward in the direction of their fears. But what about attention? If modern neuroscience teaches us that we do not attend to that which we find boring or irrelevant, how can we say that we are not just spinning our wheels by doing so?
In Brain Rules, John Medina talks about the importance of the connection between the teacher and the child in fostering real learning. He even suggests that the teachers of the future might undergo a test for innate empathetic capabilities. He has hit the nail on the head here. It is difficult to learn from a teacher with whom you do not connect. It is also possible to become highly motivated by a teacher who is passionate about a subject for which you previously had little to no natural interest in pursuing. In my own home town of Santa Rosa, there was one passionate teacher at the junior high level who sent droves of students off in the direction of accounting (yes accounting!) because of his passion for the subject. We all know this to be true. You can love or hate history from one year to the next based on the teacher you get. I remember my daughter coming home one day in sixth grade completely turned onto history by one good teacher. I was so grateful! Finally!
I also remember getting a straight A in my senior year high school chemistry class and then a straight F in my college freshman class. The instructor in high school made me love the subject and my instructor in college was horrendous. I remember clearly the day he told us that he hated having to teach this class, but he had to in order to be able to continue his research. Too bad we didn’t have cell phone video cameras back then!
The good news is that this empathy between teacher and student is reciprocal. If a child, even a kindergartener, perceives that I love them and have their best interests in mind, they can and will attend to what they might not have been naturally curious about if they understand that I believe they need it. They comprehend that I am working towards their best interests in the same way that they understand that their parent is trying to save them from being burned by a hot pot or drowned in the deep end of the pool. Medina talks about human’s unique ability to understand what others wants and needs are and to work collaboratively towards the group goal and therefore individual survival needs. He calls this the Theory of Mind: “Theory of Mind is the ability to understand the interior motivations of others and the ability to construct a predictable theory of how someone else’s mind works, what are their wants and needs.” Medina attributes our rise as a species to this unique ability. In other words, collaborating and cooperating was naturally selected for because it led to increased survival.
I also remember getting a straight A in my senior year high school chemistry class and then a straight F in my college freshman class. The instructor in high school made me love the subject and my instructor in college was horrendous. I remember clearly the day he told us that he hated having to teach this class, but he had to in order to be able to continue his research. Too bad we didn’t have cell phone video cameras back then!
The good news is that this empathy between teacher and student is reciprocal. If a child, even a kindergartener, perceives that I love them and have their best interests in mind, they can and will attend to what they might not have been naturally curious about if they understand that I believe they need it. They comprehend that I am working towards their best interests in the same way that they understand that their parent is trying to save them from being burned by a hot pot or drowned in the deep end of the pool. Medina talks about human’s unique ability to understand what others wants and needs are and to work collaboratively towards the group goal and therefore individual survival needs. He calls this the Theory of Mind: “Theory of Mind is the ability to understand the interior motivations of others and the ability to construct a predictable theory of how someone else’s mind works, what are their wants and needs.” Medina attributes our rise as a species to this unique ability. In other words, collaborating and cooperating was naturally selected for because it led to increased survival.
In the classroom, this type of trust is built up over time in a myriad of ways, from the Band-Aids lovingly applied, to the shoe-laces tied for the umpteenth time, to the snack provided when hungry. As a teacher, you must first attend to Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs in order to create the environment where trust and collaboration can flourish. They grow to trust you and each other and to understand that when you ask them to attend it is for a reason. Even at the junior high level, I have had students who have come back to tell me that they are getting an A in high school English because of me. Something made them attend to all that “boring grammar” and that something was the love or more objectively, the Theory of Mind that our interests are mutually beneficial. Even in kindergarten, they can perceive that I have their best interests in mind.
That being said, even students who get the big picture can’t maintain that attention for very long if you don’t somehow tap into their prior knowledge and schema for making sense of the data. With grammar, I used to liken it to a math problem. “Isn’t it great that there is a way to figure out and prevent your teacher from putting all those red marks on your paper?” In math, no one can put red marks on your math answers if they are right, but in writing, the teacher can bleed all over your creation no matter how brilliant it was, no matter how hard you worked. That’s so irritating! They liked that argument because it was very empowering. I also tapped into their deep seeded needs to collaborate, to create and to compete. We used to do grammar games. The kids had to create their own board games in small groups to teach the 8 parts of speech, and then learn how to play each other’s games. We played grammar baseball where you came up to bat and answered a grammar question in order to get a chance to swing. We also did grammar bees, where two columns of kids raced to diagram a sentence properly. You could either add one word to the diagram or erase an error of a previous player. The first team to get the sentence diagrammed properly would win, and we kept track of team points. That was super fun and engaging. We also did the hard work of grinding through the Daily Oral Language (DOL) for ten minutes each day to create mastery.
So as a teacher and their daytime parent, you will find that you will sometimes need to (1) ignore or even thwart their natural curiosities, (2) artificially create a need-to-know based on existing and connected relevancies, and (3) create an educational environment in which there is curricular time provided to foster their natural curiosities. Project-based learning seeks to harness the natural curiosity in students and their innate needs for communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity to extend both content and process skills. The teacher will deliver content, teach the student how to get content on their own, and guide them towards content and process skills mastery. Along the way, children will learn things they "needed to know" and some other things "they didn't know they needed to know". With balance, they will develop a life-long love for learning.