Ways to Make Learning Interesting

5th floor lecture hall at Baruch College. Take... 

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Sometimes it’s difficult for a teacher to understand how the subject they are teaching could bore someone, especially if it’s a subject that they themselves are very passionate about. Especially if there is a large age gap between you and your students, though, you need to adjust your curriculum a bit if you want to capture students’ attention.

Here are some tips on making your teaching — both subjects and teaching style — more interesting to your students.

  • Make it fun. There’s no easier way to lose a student’s interest than to pick a focus topic that is dry; try to pick something that a young person will find at least a little interesting. For example, if you teach English, assigning everyone essays about ecology for eight weeks will not win you any popularity contests. A study topic like popular fiction would do just as well for testing students’ ability to write essays in good English, and would hold interest much better.
  • Make it relavent to your students. If you teach seniors, perhaps golf and cooking would be good choices for study topics. If you teach teenagers, try popular musical artists. If you teach something like math, try making a word problem about Justin Bieber and see how quickly they pay attention! Even tuning into direct.tv to a popular reality tv show, and having an open discussion about it  for a popular culture assignment will excite them, and keep them interested.
  • Mix it up. Don’t do the same thing every week — eight weeks of one study topic will lose almost anyone’s interest, while a different topic each week will switch often enough to keep people from losing interest. Just don’t mix it up too often, or students might forget what they learned last week before they can do the test about it!
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Hands-on Learning Captures Students’ Attention

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Teaching today has fallen into a predictable pattern of book learning, lectures, tests and essays. Younger children love school and learning, then when they hit second or third grade they start to think of learning and homework more as chores than adventures like they used to. The difference is that teaching styles change around these grades. The focus shifts from capturing a child’s imagination to putting them to the test.

The hands-on approach of early education could do a lot to improve the outlook of older students. This isn’t to say that high schoolers should get out the craft glue, glitter and macaroni they used in preschool, but what if they had more classes that involved video, audio, and getting up out of their chairs? The tendency to sleep through class, disrespect the teacher, and ignore the subject they are studying would decrease.

If you are a teacher, try the hands-on approach. The trouble with getting kids to learn has never been about what they are learning, only the way that it is taught, and it’s your job as the teacher to make your lessons engaging and interesting enough to hold students’ attention. While many schools believe that test scores will improve with more book learning, the opposite seems to be true — the more schools focus on memorization and book learning, the less informations tudents truly retain. Instead they simply memorize the answers long enough to pass the test.

Hands-on learning creates a mind-body connection through stimulation of the senses that imprints the information into the mind, allowing the student to remember the information better. Ultimately, isn’t long-term learning what we’re aiming for?

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Working With Problem Children

Every class seems to have one of these — the so-called “problem child” who acts out in class, never does any of their work, and claims to hate learning. Here are some tips on how to deal with — and more importantly, work with and help — a problem child.

  • Be compassionate. Kids who act out against teachers and make trouble for them generally have other problems of their own going on that aren’t related to class, and are trying to express themselves in the way that they can. For example, a kid who plays pranks at school may be trying to get a reaction out of you because they don’t get much attention at home. Even bad attention is attention.
  • Don’t attack. Don’t intentionally embarrass a problem child by confronting them about their behavior in front of the class. Always take them aside after class to discuss any incidents. When you discuss, don’t get aggressive — try to paint yourself as an ally who wants to figure out what the problem is together.
  • Spend one on one time. All too often, the problem child is acting out because they do not have the same learning style as the rest of the class, so what keeps the other students’ attention either bores or confuses them, leaving them restless. It may take extra time and attention to coax good behavior out of a problem child, but ultimately helping them to enjoy learning and participate in your class will be more satisfying for your efforts.

Helping a child to learn is what teachers are really here for; it makes all the difference for many former “problem chldren”.

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