"Boring" Stuff is Necessary

I was surprised yet again today. It was just when I thought that my college education could not get anymore interesting. In order to study the nervous system, we watched a segment from Schoolhouse Rock. Enough said.

Anyway, today is game day. After I wrap up my class here in about 40 minutes, I will be traveling down to Tipton. We play Elwood this evening so I am sure that the crowd will be fired up for this game.

The team is doing really well. The "A" team is undefeated still at 7-0. The "B" team is 2-5 but I think we've got a good shot of improving it over the next few weeks.

I really have very little to write about today. I cannot quite think of anything really. I do know that I am tired of being a student. Also, I am tired of being told what to learn.

So many times I have noticed that the instructor is more worried about finding something that will interest the kids instead of trying to find ways to make those "boring" subjects more understandable to the kids.

Granted, teaching kids about the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution is no picnic. When kids hear search and seizure I am pretty sure that they are thinking, "We never had seizure's when we searched for something." But maybe we could make it a little more interesting if we discussed one thing that is very important to a young kid - their room.

Instead of talking about British soldiers entering a colonists house, let's first talk about Mom, Dad, or Grandma coming into a kid's room and messing with their stuff. It can be little things from messing with the posters on the wall or big things like deleting songs on their Ipod. "Oh heck no!" is what they would say and then I think we could introduce the "boring" stuff.

I believe that the true difficulty and great challenge of being a teacher is trying to make kids understand the things that they consider boring. Also, just because a subject may seem boring does not mean that we cannot and should not teach it.

We have to remember what it was that made it boring for us as kids and put a new twist on it so that our kids will not have the same experience. We might surprise ourselves.