So... engaging students. I would call it the number two issue in teaching, number one being motivating students. As someone originally trained as a history teacher, I feel like I have a pretty good perspective on this one. I've long said that if you asked a group of adults what subject they found the most boring in school, most of them would say history. Come on - who wants to learn about a bunch of dead white guys? If you were a twelve-year-old girl with neon hair, would you be thrilled about Hammurabi?
We've spent this school year addressing the Big Question (eggghhhh.... buzzword), "Why should I care about history?" For those of you who have read my earlier posts, you know about my Historical Person Project. The heart of this is finding a way to make "old stuff" relevant.
So... Hammurabi. Mesopotamia. Who cares? Well, hopefully everyone, since these days Mesopotamia is known as Iraq. Got a relative or neighbor over there? Engaging students starts with respecting the fact that they won't care unless you shed some light on the relevance.
For another subject area, much has been said these past years about NASA and whether or not it makes sense to fund the space program when people are starving here on Earth. One look at the Velcro on a pair of sneakers brings a beautiful opportunity to talk about all of the terrestrial items that branch off of space program research. My students are currently exploring Newton's laws by building paper rockets that we're shooting off with compressed air. They are definitely engaged.
So I was a little off, but they DID popularize it:
ReplyDelete"Are Tang, Teflon, and Velcro NASA spinoffs?
Tang, Teflon, and Velcro, are not spinoffs of the Space Program. General Foods developed Tang in 1957, and it has been on supermarket shelves since 1959. In 1962, when astronaut John Glenn performed eating experiments in orbit, Tang was selected for the menu, launching the powdered drink’s heightened public awareness. NASA also raised the celebrity status of Teflon, a material invented for DuPont in 1938, when the Agency applied it to heat shields, space suits, and cargo hold liners. Velcro was used during the Apollo missions to anchor equipment for astronauts’ convenience in zero gravity situations. Although it is a Swiss invention from the 1940s, it has since been associated with the Space Program."
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinfaq.htm