4 ms·
Well said, and it rhymes with many of the mistakes we have made in the past. We discount the social, the emotional, the storytelling... Often they're what matte
by dalbasal 3y ago
Well said, and it rhymes with many of the mistakes we have made in the past. We discount the social, the emotional, the storytelling... Often they're what matters.
It also rhymes with common parenting folk wisdom that having "the wrong friends" is detrimental to grades.
>the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.
This.
The reason not one student learned French in my four years of mandatory French classes is that we didn't want to know french. We didn't know any french people. We didn't care about french songs or movies.
OTOH, when telenovelas became a local fad, every girl had a clique of Spanish speaking 13 year olds.
The actual problem in that case is: How do you teach french/philosophy/whatever to a class full of kids who don't want to learn that stuff? Maybe they want to pass exams and get grades. Maybe you can rejigger discipline mechanisms to motivate them... but that is never going to get you to good.
- ghaff 3y agoI'd reword your French example a bit. I had the proverbial four years of high school French which I cared about and performed at probably about a median level (which is to say fairly well) of my high school subjects in general. Especially in a pre-Web world though, absent pestering my parents to arrange some sort of exchange student situation--which would have gone well beyond my level of caring for any other subject and may or may not have been practical--I was probably never going to get to a high level of French proficiency without some sort of immersion.
- nradov 3y agoAfter about age 10, children are more influenced by their peers than by parents or teachers. If friends aren't interested in learning then they won't care either. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-matter-of-personality/202301/who-influences-teens-more-peers-or-family https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-matter-of-person...