You Are Going to Use This in Life - Just Not the Way You Think You Are

If I had to choose the number one, big daddy, most annoying question any teacher ever gets asked, it is the following:  "When am I ever going to use this in life?"

Insert B-movie scream here!

I hate this question.  Hate it.  Hate. It.  It's not for the reason you think. 

It isn't because I don't have an answer.  I have one - a long, well thought out, complex and beautiful answer you never listen to.  It isn't because you are insulting my curriculum; I totally know you don't all fall down with joy, hoping I'll talk more about the periodic table today.  It isn't because I'm part of a vast conspiracy to fill your head with knowledge you will never, ever need (and I know some of you believe that).  The reason I hate this question is because it reflects a fundamentally flawed belief about why you learn.  You think it is about getting a job.

You think elementary school is about middle school, and middle school is about high school, and high school is about college, and college is about the job you will have for forty years, (and then you will play golf or knit or something for a couple of decades).  If you unpack this thinking, it means that you think kindergarten is about the job you will have in your forties.  Do you see now how absurd your teachers find this thinking?

You learn because you were created to learn.  God put curiosity in the heart of every human being.  From the moment you are born, you look as far as you can look (which at that time is 18" - about the distance to from your eyes to the eyes of the person holding you).  You study that face and learn what a face is.  Eventually, you find your own hands and feet and start learning about those.  When you begin to crawl, you become a Magellan level explorer, and you never once ask how that thing on the other side of the room is going to influence your career.  You just want to learn about it.  You learn color theory by experimentation (mixing crayons).  By the time you are four years old, you are asking why or how something works an average of 400 times per day.  At no point in those 400 questions do you think about the utility of that information.  When you ask your dad why the sky is blue, it is absolutely not because you think one day you will have a job in which that information might be useful.  You ask because you want to know.

Then, you go to school.  The minute you put your butt in a desk, your parents start thinking of everything you learn as a career related.  Worse, they start talking to you that way.  They start using phrases like "use this is the real world" and "use this in life."  I have heard parents of fifth graders ask how the project their child just did will affect college acceptance.  No wonder we have so many kids with anxiety issues.  If I really believed one project would fundamentally change the course of my life, I would be stressed too.

Before I address teacher responsibility in this problem, allow me to rabbit trail for a second on "the real world."  There is no part of the world that is imaginary!  Life does not start at 22.  School is just as real a part of the world as any other part.  It is the part where your child spends many hours of his day and puts a lot of his energy.  Stop making it sound like it doesn't matter at all because it isn't real.

Teachers a part of the problem.  We use the idea of career as motivation to make students learn, and then we are confused when it backfires on us while we teach music to a kid who is going to be an engineer or science to a kid who is going to be a musician.  Teachers, let's model curiosity for our students.  Let's not blow off spelling words correctly because we aren't English teachers.  Let's not make kids think that only math teachers need to know math or that art only matters to artists.

One of my favorite things at GRACE is that our teachers are incredibly well rounded.  We have had teachers who taught math and dance in the same day.  We have a history/science teacher.  I teach both science and yearbook.  One of our English teachers decided on her own to read The Disappearing Spoon, a book about the periodic table of elements.  Our Latin teacher is reading a book about the mathematical history of tracking time.  Our students see teachers across every discipline asking each other questions, not because we have to use it in our job, but because it is interesting. 

Learning is about worship.  It brings us closer to God when we learn about the world and how he created it.  That's kind of standard science teacher answer because it is clear we study creation, but math, art, music, and language are also creations of God.  Let's glorify Him better by learning about His work.