Teaching Awe - Why Do You Love It?

Last week, I talked about joyful learning.  This week, I would like to address something our curriculum-driven, standards-obsessed educational culture has forgotten.  We learn best those things about which we are curious.  I'm not advocating for student-driven, personalized learning.  I'm suggesting that part of our pedagogy needs to be stoking curiosity by revealing those parts of our disciplines that are awe-inspiring.

When I took physics, I spent every day in awe.  Was it because my physics teacher did something dramatic?  Sometimes.  But often, it was the physics itself.  Knowing how the world worked made me happy in ways I didn't yet understand.  It was the first time math had made sense to me as expressions of relationships between real things.  I didn't love history, but the best history teachers I have told amazing stories of people from the past and then showed the themes that keep repeating about how we treat each other and those we consider unlike ourselves.  Trigonometry was the first math class I took that I actually looked forward to.  There was something about the relationships shown in the unit circle that thrilled me.  I'm sure there were people who enjoyed different parts of different classes; the same things don't appeal to all of us.

I want my students to understand that physics is a way of knowing something real about the world and that we have used it, not just to advance society by inventing new things, but also to understand without need to turn that knowledge into a commodity.  

My advice to teachers is this.  When lesson planning, of course, you have to think about curriculum and standards, but take a moment to look at what you are teaching and remember what made you love it.  You chose to teach math or literature or band or computer science for a reason.  Give students a glimpse of that by telling a story or showing your own amazement.  My physics classes are currently in a chapter on sound waves.  While talking about wavelength and frequency and amplitude, I find it important to take a day and talk about how our ears process it.  This is not in the curriculum.  No physics standards says, "students will understand how the human ear processes sound waves," but I think it is amazing that we have structures in our ears that turn patterns of pressure differences into electrical signals.  Even more amazing is the fact that we do not yet have a full understanding of how these structures function.  Perhaps one of my students will be the person who figures that out, but even if that doesn't happen, I want them all to want to know.  I want them all to be curious about things we have not figured out.  

It's easy in science because it is almost all revealing of some underlying principle that is neat to know.  But perhaps there is something about how poetry is structured that you find amazing.  Perhaps there is a historical figure who inspires you.  Perhaps the way colors blend in a painting takes you to your happy place.  Show students that.

If you want students to score well on standardized tests, stick to the book standards.  If you want kids to be lifelong learners, show them the awe of your discipline.  By the way, they'll do better on tests too because they'll be more likely to follow you down a rabbit hole and learn things they hadn't planned to.