Teaching Tip #132

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #132

This was aimed at beginning teachers, but can’t it apply to us all?

Commandment #1 -  The secret to learning anything is enjoyment

Amen.  Would you want to be a student in your class?

Odds are if you don’t enjoy learning what you’re teaching, how can you expect your students to enjoy it?

I’m not claiming all learning has to be enjoyable.  Maybe this is where Mr. Lingen’s saying, “Fake it until you make it” comes in.

Or maybe you need to make students see how this boring material fits into a larger more enjoyable big picture?

For example – I don’t get excited about grammar.  But when we focus on grammar in College Comp, I do so in a highly engaging way.  I use sentences that make fun of other teachers (namely, Mr. Hickman) and myself.  

I tell my students that I know this isn’t the most thrilling stuff on earth (I mean who really gets fired up over simple, compound, complex, and compound complex sentences?), but you must master these in order to write well, to effective paint the descriptive essays you will need to in here, to tell the amazing rite of passage stories in here and so on.  That way I try to show them that the mundane stuff we are working on will tie in to a much larger and much more enjoyable big picture.