Work Worth Doing

Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was known for doing hard work to overcome great obstacles.  He was born rather sickly, battling asthma by adopting a "strenuous lifestyle."  He attended Harvard, wrote books, served as the Secretary of the Navy, fought in the War in Cuba, became governor of New York, and became President in the Wake of the assassination of President McKinley.  He busted monopolies, established the National Parks system, built the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.  This was an accomplished man who knew the value of hard work.

In a campaign speech to the farmers of upstate New York, another group of people who knew the value of hard work, Roosevelt said, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."  He believed that work was the thing that gave life meaning.  It was how you rebounded from the difficulties of life; it was good for the spirit.  When his wife died, he threw himself into his work.  In that same speech to the farmers of New York, he said, "There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler."

When I was a kid, I was a little afraid of growing up.  It seemed like every adult I knew hated their job.  At least, they talked about it like they did.  When I was a teenager, I did a little survey as my fellow choir members arrived at church.  I asked each of them about their job.  I got a wide range of sighs and groans until Ron Butler came in.  When I asked him about his job, he grinned and talked about living with "spizerinctum," a word he made up for how energized he felt by his work.  It was greatly encouraging to hear an adult talk with such joy about the work he was doing, and it was clear that he loved it because he believed it mattered.  

I don't know if the work I do would be deemed working hard by President Roosevelt.  After all, I am not working a plow or building a building.  I do like to think, however, that he would consider it work worth doing.  Teaching is not simply the delivery of information from 8 to 3 as many believe.  It is teaching students to think, to evaluate, to analyze, and to create new work.  It is showing them good citizenship, good relationships with other teachers, and good submission to authority (even with rules you don't like).  It is putting your own character up as a model every minute of every day.  A former principal used to say that we should be so sure of the steps we take that we have no problem with the idea that our students will put their feet in the same steps.  Imagine that is your job every day, and you know why teachers need summer.

Adam and Eve were put into the Garden of Eden to work.  That was before the fall.  After the fall, work became difficult; but they didn't sit around doing nothing before the fall.  Work is an important part of human nature when it is productive.  When it is not productive, it is punitive.  Tedious work (like digging a hole one day just to fill it the next) has been used as a form of torture for centuries.  The psychology of the human mind is such that we must believe work is worth doing in order to work hard at it.  That's why you hear kids complain about "busy work" and why you get a lot more out of them if you tell them why they are doing it.  I am sitting here writing this on a teacher work day.  I have graded, worked on curriculum, uploaded photos to Jostens, dealt with e-mails, and written this blog.  I am not drained and exhausted because I feel this is valuable work - work worth doing.  When my students come in next Monday, I will be ready to do more work.  Am I tired at the end of the day?  You bet.  But it is a very different kind of tired than that experienced by those who view their job as drudgery.  

Social psychologist Matt Wallaert set out to explore why so many are unemployed when jobs are available.  He found that many are not finding jobs that live up to their own expectations of what they thought they would make after college.  Not realizing the value of paying their dues and comparing themselves only to their expectations, they simply opt out of the job market because it makes them feel as if they haven't really lost anything - read this article to make sense of that line.  They are also being diagnosed with depression at massive rates because they are not getting the feeling of meaning that comes from doing work worth doing.  

It has been over 100 years since President Roosevelt commended those farmers for their work, and I fear that the world they built has made us soft, made us fear difficult work, and made us believe that life owes us comfort for no other reason than that fact that we were born.  The students I teach are wonderful, but it is difficult to battle this cultural idea that we might be rich and famous without doing anything.  Commercials tell us what we deserve (money for a car accident, phone plans, tires, and contact lenses).   What have we done to earn those things?  Being alive.  If I believe pop culture, the simple act of being born has apparently endowed me with the right to stuff, to happiness, and to not ever feeling shamed or offended.  This isn't the way God made us.God made us to work.  Work, like all things, was distorted by the fall.  Work became more difficult with less result.  Work became tedious.  Work did not stop being important.  It has continued to be part of the human experience.  To quote Leslie Knope at the end of the series finale of Parks and Recreation, "Go find your team, and get to work."

The Week of Too Much

We've all had the week of too much.  We have too much to do and not enough time.  We have to much stress and not enough sleep.  We do a lot of complaining about the week of too much, but we get through it.  We don't die.  The world doesn't stop spinning on its axis, and we realize that we are not as weak as we thought.  That lesson then must be learned again by having another week of too much.

The week before Thanksgiving break is often the week of too much for our students at GRACE.  No teacher wants to ask them to hold information in their heads while their brains turn to mashed potatoes and they slip into a tryptophan coma, so we mostly plan their tests during the week before Thanksgiving.  They worry and complain.  They stress themselves, their teachers, and their parents out.  They feel like they are going to die.   But you know what?  They don't.

Just like we don't die when we have a week of too much, middle and high school students also don't die.  They come out on the other end, realizing that they are stronger than they thought they were.  This is a valuable and important lesson, and it would be wrong for us to rob them of it by giving them what they say they want.  It is important to go through stressful times because they train us for more stressful times down the road.

Last week, my students got to hear a veteran from Iwo Jima speak the day before Veteran's Day.  One of the things he said that stuck out to me was about a time near the end of his training.  He was dropped at an unknown location and given the address of a different location.  He had to get there.  They provided no help and no rescue.  This probably sounded mean to the students who were listening, but I thought about how prepared he was for the same scenario should he encounter it in Japan.  It seems mean that me give our students a lot of tests / projects in one week, but the reality is that they will be better prepared for those times inevitable to adulthood than they would be if we didn't.

No one likes to see their kids stressed, but a certain amount of stress is needed.  It is needed to prepare their brains, their stamina, and their energies for the future.  Chronic stress is bad, but brief periods of acute stress are actually necessary for building strength.  Support your students through the week of too much.  Listen to their complaints and empathize with them; but do not take away the valuable stress they are experiencing.  If you do, they will fail during their adult weeks of too much.

Find a Real Problem

Normally, this blog is about education or at least the philosophy behind my teaching.  Occasionally, however, I find it useful to use this blog to respond to a current issue.  This one has been on my mind since last year.

It's November, and soon the holidays will be upon us.  They will include heavy meals, decorated malls, shopping for gifts, and animated specials.  It is also time for Christians to write Facebook posts about the most trivial issues ever.  About this time every year, several of my Facebook friends proudly announce that they will not shop at any store where the clerk has told them "Happy Holidays."  Setting aside that there are, in fact, multiple holidays that Christian celebrate within a few weeks of each other, let's address the fact that these people act as if they should get some sort of medal for their own pride.  That poor, exhausted store clerk makes about $9 an hour trying to serve as many kinds of people as possible.  She works in retail, serving a public that is increasingly entitled, impatient, and prone to offense at the drop of a hat.  She makes the effort to wish you well, but because she didn't use your preferred method of well wishing, you lash out with your angry, "It's Merry Christmas, and I won't shop in any store that doesn't exclusively say that."  Is it any wonder why the world believes we are mean.  What a witness our snappy comeback must have been to that store clerk.

Last year, I watched as 172 people argued on social media about whether a PASTOR'S Christmas greeting was heretical or Biblical because he said X-mas.  Some took the stance that he was destroying the place of Jesus while others argued that the X was the Greek letter Chi and, therefore, stood for Jesus.  The reality was that on Twitter, he only got 140 characters and was trying to save 5 of them by using the X.  Is this really something to spend our time on?

This year, we have a brand new issue for the self righteous to get bothered about.  It is about the red cup at Starbucks.  I mean, last year it had snowflakes on it, and snowflakes are clearly more Christian than solid red.  We must use our social media power to complain about this travesty.  Red cups are a the true sign that Starbucks is anti-Christian.  Never mind that Starbucks has been donating to Planned Parenthood for years and supports gay marriage, we will not drink from a red cup at Christmas time.

Do we really think these are the problems of the world that need a response?  Right now, in the world, there are 29.8 million victims of human trafficking.  There are 795 million people who will go to sleep hungry tonight and 783 million who don't have access to clean water.  There are countries of our world in which girls are executed in the street because they committed the crime of going to school and others where girls are simply left to die because they they committed the crime of not being boys.  ISIS has behead over 300 people in the past two years, and thousands of Christians are killed for their faith every year (although there is wide debate over the exact number).  American Christians have opted to turn their backs on all these issues.  No, we must take a stand on the red cup.  We must refuse the well wishes of those who disagree with us.

Starting tomorrow, when I go to the store, I will gratefully accept the well wishes of anyone.  Whether they wish me Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings, Happy Hanukkah, or simply Have a nice day, I will return their good wishes.  I will also set aside five dollars.  In January, whatever amount I have accumulated will be donated to an organization that helps the truly persecuted around the world.  I am currently researching exactly which organization is best, but the ones I have found so far are: Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, The Persecution Project Foundation, Barnabas Aid, and RescueChristians.org.  Each of these ministries support those Christians for whom responding to persecution doesn't mean whining about the cup holding our four dollar latte or treating service personnel disrespectfully.

It's All Related

My favorite middle school history teacher, Danny Watkins, used to say, "You thought we were off the subject, but we've never been more on the subject in our - what - lives.  Everything relates to history."  Aside from just loving to hear him talk like that, I'm not sure I truly understood what he meant until much later in my life.

Like most middle school students, I did not yet have the ability to see the intertwined relationships of all the subjects I had at school.  Your life exists in 50 minute segments at that point, and it is hard to see past that.  It seemed like math was math and science was science and history was history.  It was probably when I started taking chemistry in high school that I started seeing the relationships between science and math.  When I was in college, taking the required humanities courses, I began to see the connection  between art and literature and history (which I now realize is the reason they require these courses).

It wasn't until I began teaching, however, that I realized how related all the subjects are to each other and to truly understand Mr. Watkins assertion that "everything relates to history."  This week, I took my physics students (in conjunction with the math club and an art class) on a field trip to the art museum.  Why? Because they have an exhibit on MC Escher and one on Leonardo DaVinci.  If not for space restrictions on the numbers, we could have totally included Latin and history classes on this trip.  Art reflects the thinking of the artist, and Escher's schooling (small though it was) was in architecture.  Is it any surprise that his art work often involved impossible structures, building architects could dream of but not build?  DaVinci is often referred to as a Renaissance man, meaning he was good at a lot of things.  While we are not all as gifted as Leonardo, shouldn't we all be Renaissance in our thinking?  Shouldn't we be interested in a lot of things?  If we were, wouldn't we all be able to better view the created world as a whole, instead of the specialized niches we operate in these days?


Why does it matter?  You may be wondering.  Seeing the relationships won't change the price of milk or change my gas mileage.  Why should I care enough to see the world as a whole when doing so does little to affect my daily life?  I think there are at least two good reasons.

First, it applies more to your daily life than you probably realize.  When I am teaching about physics, I may not consciously be thinking about art work of Isaac Newton's time or the fact that the periodic table was invented in Russia around the same time that the civil war was happening in America.  However, it is in my subconscious.  It does inform the depth of my understanding of what I am looking at.  You may not think consciously about whether the Mayans or the Babylonians came up with the concept of zero when looking at your bank statement, but their understanding of the concept IS why you have a bank statement.  A Facebook friend of mine recently posted that he had not diagramed a sentence in his adult life.  Neither have I, but I do know when to properly use who and whom (and I'm pretty sure that my understanding of that came from sentence diagraming even though I HATED doing it).  I know I'm not going to convince you of this, so let me move on to reason number two.

Second, and more importantly, God's work reflects God's nature.  If he has created both beauty and function, we should care about both art and engineering.  If His patience is reflected by the erosion of the Grand Canyon, we should absolutely want to understand that erosion.  If his dependability is reflected through the consistency of mathematical relationships, then we cannot fully understand how to depend on him without caring about those relationships.  Having a deep and full relationship with God should mean caring about the things He has made, whether or not they apply to our career.  When did our career become the measure of importance?  You would never say to your spouse that you don't care what he does during the day, except for the parts that impact what you do during the day.  You would never ignore your child's drawing because it has nothing to do with the price of groceries.  No, you hang it on the very refrigerator that holds those groceries.  Why, then, do we do that to so many aspects of God's work?  We have allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that education is about getting a job and being prepared for that job.  I may have to write a separate post on this some time because it is difficult to convey briefly.  Education is about repairing something that was fractured by the fall.  It's nice that we are able to use some of what we learn in our education for our jobs, but we must let go of the utilitarian philosophy that makes us think that is all we need to learn.  I teach physics, but I would be the world's most horrifyingly dull person if that was all I could talk about.  I also love art and literature and music and television and film and dance and theater and theology and the unit circle.  I can hold a conversation on just about anything because I am interested in everything God has put for us to enjoy.  It is part of being what He created me to be as a WHOLE PERSON, not just as a physics teacher.

Mr. Watkins was right (as he usually was).  It is all related.

Changing it Up on the Fly

When I was in college, I learned to write detailed lesson plans.  These were multiple page documents with the objective laid out in excruciating detail, every material you might possibly use (right down to paper and pencils), descriptions of each and every activity, and the questions you planned to ask at the end of the lesson.  Absolutely no teacher writes in this level of detail after they get out of college. That doesn't make learning it without value, a point I will return to in a moment.

When I student taught, I was placed with two teachers who were at the opposite ends of the planning spectrum.  Mr. Bell was type A, high strung, sinister man who planned like a Bond villain.  He had plans for his plans, which were written always and only in fine point black ball point pen.  That was the right way to do it, and if you used a medium point, you were just wrong.  My second teacher was a "go with the flow," extroverted, relationship is everything kind of woman who was 9 months pregnant (our last days were the same day).  She would come into the room in the morning and say, "What are we going to do today?  Let's see."  When I had my "defense" of student teaching with the committee, they asked me what I learned from having such varied experiences.  My response was that I didn't think I could be either one of them.  I would probably slide around somewhere in the middle.

I am a planner.  Every personality test says so, and it's not like I needed a test to know it.  I have back up plans for my back up plans and make lists every day which may or may not be cross referenced to other lists.  However, teaching is far too fluid an experience to expect my plans to be completely set in stone.  A good teacher has plans, but a great teacher can make changes to those plans on the fly.

I can anticipate times when I know my plans will have to change, and (wait for it) I plan for them.  However, you won't always be able to expect these times.  You will have the best plan that involves the coolest website, only to find that the filter blocks that site on student computers.  You will have the perfect demonstration, but it requires that you be outside on a day when it rains.  You can't just fall apart in those moments and have students do nothing.  Let me repeat that a different way: There is nothing more dangerous than a group of students who have nothing to do!  When you are making your plans, consider the possibilities and figure out a back up.  Maybe there is a youtube video of that cool demo that you can use if it's not possible to do it live.  With a couple of days notice, your IT people might be able to unblock that website.  If you don't know it is blocked until the kids are in front of you, send an e-mail to IT, and start teaching the follow up first.  Maybe it will be unblocked by the end of class, and you can do the activity tomorrow.  Unless you teach math, there are many ways to change the order of what you are teaching to adapt to surprises.

Let's also remember this.  Our curriculum is important, but we are not the only person who will ever teach them any one topic or skill.  If my 8th grade doesn't learn about the polarity of a water molecule, they will encounter it again in biology as well as high school chemistry.  When you have to change things up, focus on having them learn what is most important, not just what you had planned for that day.  It may be that the lesson your students learn that day is the humility and flexibility modeled by their teacher.

Community Service Day

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community . . . " is the beginning of our mission statement.  Because of that, we have our students reach out to the community in a variety of ways.

Within the school, we take care of each other.  If someone gets sick, we make meals for them (like proper Southerners do).  Teachers meet twice a week for prayer and once a week for a faculty meeting and multiple times if there are special needs.  Teachers have donated their sick days to staff members with long term illnesses.  We have held charity walks for members of our community to help them with finances, collected baby items for one of our teacher's nephews who was born just after hurricane Katrina and then arranged for the students to attend a funeral after that baby died a few months later.  When my cat died, I got sympathy cards from several members of our staff and one alumna.  GRACE is a loving community, and you experience it quickly and overpoweringly if you have a need.

We do not, however, want our students to believe that we only take care of our own.  We want the to recognize that, having been blessed by God, we have a responsibility to share our blessings and the  love of Christ with those around our community and around the world.  For that reason, we set aside two days each school year in which we empty out our upper school building for the entire day so that middle school students, high school students, and teachers can go out into our community for a day of service.

Let me first give a big shout out to the receptionists who have taken charge of this over the years.  Michele, Dana, and now Lisa have taken the enormous task of sending hundreds of kids to multiple places with multiple adults.  If you are a teacher reading this, you know what a hassle it is to plan a field trip for you class of 30 kids.  Imagine doing it with 330 kids (and not all to the same location).  This involves permission slip, money for the bus drivers, parent drivers and chaperones, grouping kids, figuring out which ones need to bring their lunches and which done, emergency information packets, medicine for the right kids to the correct adult.  It's crazy.  The work of this person is just as much a community service as the kids going out to do the work.  The students do a variety of things.

Middle School - Gleaning -  Our middle school students were taken to a sweet potato field, where they spent all day gleaning.  For those who may not know, gleaning is a practice established in Old Testament law.  Farmers were instructed by God to leave some of their harvest in the fields for the poor to harvest and eat.  The modern version of this the farmer harvested only one round of sweet potatoes and then has allowed ministries to come out and dig up more.  They are then bagged and taken to the food bank.  We had 122 7th and 8th grade students digging in soil!



Freshmen - Thrift Shops - We always send our freshmen to thrift shops.  We want them to see that other people live on less than they do and that new is not always better.  We want them to understand
that they can help in a variety of ways.  We divide them between With Love From Jesus, the Mabopane Foundation, and two Thrift 2 Gift Stores.  They do a variety of things, from sorting clothes to cleaning to decorating Christmas trees to organizing food to checking out customers.  Basically, they do whatever the store owners ask them to do.  I like visiting these sites because kids have usually found some strange, interesting, vintage item that they would want to buy themselves.  This shows they are gaining a perspective on the materialistic world they are soaked in.  In past years, many students have returned from these stores and organized their own food drive because they saw a greater need than they knew.




Sophomores - Service Homes - We want at least one year of their experience to include interacting with the people they are serving.  There are several homes or day centers in the area that deal with the mentally disabled, the elderly, or those transitioning back into normal life.  Since sophomores are at an age where they can interact appropriately, we send them to those homes.  They are able to have meals with the people, play games, have Bible studies, and generally get to interact.  Because of the personal interaction with people so unlike themselves, I believe it gives them a perspective on the world they might not otherwise get.  These can be some of the more difficult sites because they are sometimes seeing very difficult circumstances.

Juniors - Habitat for Humanity - We love helping Habitat.  Students often report this as their favorite year because they get to build something.  They get to see the end result.  Sometimes, we have been lucky enough to have the construction professionals tell us about the family who will live in the house.  Kids don't generally get to build things in their childhood the way they used to because we have safety-ed kids to death.  Putting them in a hard hat on a construction site, swinging a hammer (or using power tools) let them see the possibilities of being makers.

Seniors - Wherever We Can - This year, our seniors were split into two groups.  One group spent the day at the Salvation Army and another at Meals on Wheels.  I was unable to get to the Meals on Wheels crew, but I did get to visit the Salvation Army.  They put our boys to work in the warehouse and girls in their store.  It was great for them to get to see the variety of ways one ministry can help so many.  I hope when they hear the bucket bell ringers this year, they will want to stop and give.  One of my homeroom students was at Meals on Wheels, and while she reported some sadness at some of the circumstances she encountered, she also said, "I'm definitely more grateful for the life I have."  That awareness is the beginning.  We want them to take that awareness and gratitude for their blessings and pass them on to others.

As a teacher, I love our community service days.  I like seeing my students step out of their normal routine, move out in courage and faith, and serve others.  Thank you to all the ministries who allow us to invade your routine in order to open the eyes of our kids.

One other thought - Our elementary kids participate in a lot of service as well.  They just don't leave school for the day to do it.  They collect coats every year for the WRAL Coats for Kids campaign.  They make pillowcases for military members.  Their teachers organize activities for their classes to do.  I didn't want to ignore them just because this post was about the day we just had.

Let Them Be Curious and Make Them Curious

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a conference of Christian School teachers in my area, called ACSI Nexus.  This is not a normal convention because for the most part, we all listen to the same speakers.  There is a live site (in Maryland I think) that beams out the signal to satellite sites all over the world.  This year, we had an excellent collection of speakers (see my notes in a previous post).  The one I most looked forward to was by Dr. Kevin Washburn.  I looked forward to it partially because I have seen other presentations and enjoy his style and partially because his topic was the role of curiosity in the learning process.

We all know (I hope) that a student will be more likely to learn something they are curious about.  Some have taken that to mean that we should not have curricula.  We should just allow students to explore whatever interests them, and then they will get the things they need for the career they will ultimately have.  Aside from that being a little hippy dippy for 2015, let's analyze the problem with that.  A student doesn't always know what they will like until they have been exposed to it by a passionate advocate of that thing.  My second favorite vegetable on earth is a zucchini (the first is green peas in case you are interested), but I would have never have eaten the first bite of zucchini if it had not been for my friend Kay's mom.  When you ate dinner at Kay's house, her mom pulled a number out of thin air and required you to eat at least that number of everything before you could say you didn't want any more.  I'll never forget this day.  She was steaming zucchini, and that looked weird to me.  She said, "You don't have to like it, but you have to eat three slices."  Those three slices have turned into three hundred thousand slices over the course of my life.  You don't like the food example, here's one that is more on point.  The great love of my academic life is physics.  When I tell people what I do, I do not get positive responses from most people; but I adore it.  Before I took it in high school, I didn't know that I liked it.  My chemistry teacher insisted that I take honors physics, so I did.  On day four, I had already decided that teaching physics would be the thing I did for a living.

Why, because the man in this picture was amazing at showing me how much he loved it; and it made me love it too.  This photo (which I took, developed, printed, matted, and framed myself) hangs behind my desk on the wall of my classroom.  I am still inspired by his love of physics as well as his love for teaching.  This is Jim Barbara, who was THE best physics teacher I could have had.  One thing I remember the most is that he liked it when I asked him questions.  I had poor Mr. Barbara the last period of the day.  Not having another class to run off to, I would stay after class and ask him everything from why electricity hurt when it shocked you to how a key  opened a lock.  I'm sure Mr. Barbara had other things to get done, be he patiently and enthusiastically answered every question.

So, if we aren't going to take the hippy approach to curiosity, there's always the other end up the pendulum's arc.  I'm the teacher; I know what you need to know; you don't; listen to what I am telling you; don't worry about learning anything else; don't worry if you haven't been excited to learn anything I have taught you all year long; just learn it.  If you are this kind of teacher, please leave the profession.  Don't wait until the end of the year.  Go to your principal and resign as soon as you finish this post.  There is not room for you in 2015 teaching.  We all know that we can't make everything a student learns thrilling just as we can't deep fry zucchini in chocolate sauce (well, there is the fair, so maybe we can do that).  But if you haven't made your students curious about anything, you have a problem.  If they have had no enthusiasm for learning anything all year, it isn't them.

So, what is the middle ground between the hippy and the autocrat?  It is two fold.  First, you can make your students curious about whatever you are teaching them.  You may have to get creative, but you work in a creative field.  Google "demonstrations for _____" whatever the thing is you are teaching tomorrow.  When I teach Bernoulli's principle, I start class by asking someone to blow under a sheet of paper I have sitting on two books.  I offer them a dollar if they can blow it up and off the paper.  When it does the opposite of what they think it is going to, I can talk for twenty minutes, explaining the principle and how it relates to flight and why the windows blow out of your house in a tornado and how a curve ball works.  I could do the demonstration after we have learned it, but doing it before makes them want to understand it.  It doesn't take a different amount of time, and it is way more fun.

The second is to follow some rabbit trails.  As you can tell from the title of my blog, I believe strongly in the rabbit trail.  I have always believed that this is where most of the learning happens.  I have also been teaching long enough to know that you can't just follow EVERY trail wherever it leads.  You have the pressures of curriculum, AP requirements, and common core.  Some of you may even have administrations who expect you to cover the entire book.  This doesn't mean you can't allow for some of them.  There are a lot of ways to do this.  Have a five minute time period after they start asking questions where you keep calling on kids before you have to say, "Now, back to what we were doing because we do have to finish."  Invite your kids to e-mail questions to you, and then use a half day (when it is hard to accomplish a whole lesson anyway) to answer them.  I knew an elementary teacher who had a stack of post its on every student's desk so they could write questions as they thought of them and then ask them when she had open question time.  If you teach the same subject long enough, you will know where it is important to work in time because the same questions arise every year at that time.  When I teach sound waves, I spend one day on the human ear because it helps to connect all the stuff we learn about frequency and amplitude and timbre if they understand the ear process the wave.  After a few years, I realized that I was answering questions every year about ears popping on a plane, tubes, and hearing under water.  I had planned my lesson bell to bell and quickly answer those and then talk really fast about everything else.  Now, I know those rabbit trails are coming, and I leave time in my lesson for them to ask.  If they don't ask, I throw the rabbit in myself.  I say something like, "Sometimes, people ask about why your ears pop on an airplane.  Do you ever wonder about that?"  That's usually enough to get them going the direction I want, thinking they saw the rabbit themselves.  For those worried curriculum coverage, how is the discussion of pressure on the eardrum not a reinforcement of what we already learned about pressure in the curriculum?  The discussion on hearing under water is introducing the concept of refraction, which they will be learning later in the same chapter.  They'll be so much more interested in learning that when I say, "Remember the answer to Brad's question a few weeks ago about hearing under water?  Guess what?  Light does that too."

There are all kinds of ways to take advantage of student curiosity, whether they have it when they walk through the door or you throw a rabbit at them to take them down the trail you want.  They will  like your class more and (more importantly) learn the material more deeply and fully.  That's what we all want, no matter what the other pressures are.