Teaching Between Sneak Peak of my Book!

When are we ever going to use this?

About three hundred kids call me Mr. Shehorn and I am the cool teacher (by their standards).

I am much younger, poorly dressed, and earnest. My students are snapping pictures of my back because I have begrudgingly become the subject of a student-run parody social media page where “Mr. Shehorn” says encouraging riddles that sound like they were lines from Yoda after too much caffeine. I gave them permission to make fun of my last name, so students in the class started calling me ‘The Mantusk’.

They like me and it motivates them.

They do not like their ninth-grade worksheet on the Mexican American War. They try to rush me through the lesson because their favorite part of every class is the minutes at the end when I let them talk about current events.

Halfway through the worksheet one frustrated hand raises. “Mantusk! When are we going to use this?”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that question, I would have stayed in public education.

I pull out my whiteboard marker, and I am delighted to explain the direct connection between the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the modern immigration arguments they hear about at home. The same issues of geography, language, and cultural identity are still present two hundred years later.

The room starts to shift as some hands raise. Students volunteer what they have heard around their dinner tables. They are making connections with their new context and want to share their experience from their very real worlds, and I excitedly hear their opinions and ideas, moderating as they respond to each other.

This is the moment that an idea suddenly becomes clear. “When are we ever going to use this?” is not a challenge to my authority. It is a request for relevance and a critical sign of cognitive development.

------------

“When are we ever going to use this?” is not a challenge to my authority. It is a request for relevance and a critical sign of cognitive development.

I am not going to tell you that I was a good schoolteacher. My lesson design was traditional in a way that I find embarrassing now. My classroom management was weak on a good day. But I did have a secret weapon: relevance. My top success strategy was answering the earnest pleas for relevance at least once an hour.

I tried several ways to respond. When I treated the request from my students as genuine, but stuck to my old lesson plans, mentioning a possible theoretical future, the response I received was always blank stares. If I treated this as defiance to my lesson plans, I confirmed they are not going to use this. I also taught them to keep their thoughts to themselves, which was good for the schedule and bad for their participation.

When I treated this as a developmental milestone, an emerging need for relevance driven by the brain, I changed my lesson plans to spend more time on the content that could be informed by the student’s life experiences. I searched for inspiration in their lives to pick content that was related. When I was successful, the response was always more motivation. It was not always a breakthrough but teaching young people is a marathon and not a sprint. Relevance was extra work and it meant important things that ‘might’ or ‘should’ matter, got less time. I believe it was worth the energy.