Making Content Come Alive

MAKING CONTENT COME ALIVE FOR ALL STUDENTS I was not a good student in middle school. I was so much more interested in music, movies, and girls. School was a social arena, purely. I held good grades, “did” school by completing my homework in a timely manner (though not thoroughly by any means) and was punctual for class. But I can honestly say that not much was retained from those years regarding content. Certainly I remember experiences, but content? Not so much… I particularly remember seventh and eighth grade social studies classes. I would walk into the classroom and the chalkboard would be full of notes, usually in full sentences. As the teacher was pontificating, we’d be scribbling furiously to copy down three boards’ worth of material. Then, he’d light the transparency machine and there’d be more notes to copy, sometimes in outline form, and all the while the teacher was talking, talking. The other teacher would do much of the same. And both classes pertained exclusively to names, facts, dates – rote memorization, pure lower Bloom. No extension, no connection, no investment. I remember we had this project on inflation (in 1984), and it was purely a data dump – find information, copy it down, use colors, find a picture or two: A-. I walked away from that assignment still thinking inflation was what one did to fill the tires on a bicycle. And my English/Language Arts classes? Beyond Mrs. Davis, who ingrained the formula of the Keyhole Essay into my DNA and used Flowers for Algernon and Edgar Allan Poe to enlighten me about never trusting a narrator (and to whom I will be forever grateful), most of the classes were again rote activities, disconnected from me and my world and therefore had little permanence. Grammar instruction was a commercial break, removed from any contextual connections, and certainly removed from my world. So how to make content come alive? Socrates believed that all knowledge was innate, and one needed to be