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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!