Success in School Starts with High Expectations
If you're a teacher, you've heard it. "When am I ever going to use this?" Or, "I am never going to use this!" The older the kids you teach, the more I think you hear it. I teach mostly 11th and 12th graders and I know I hear it plenty. The truth is very few kids think they're ever going to need to know that Washington crossed the Delaware, the difference between an indirect and a direct object, the acceleration constant due to gravity, or the Pythagorean Theorem. Not all complain, but many do. Every time you try to teach them something! I'm sure I was probably just like them at their age, convinced that nothing I was learning in school would be useful after graduation. Boy was I wrong! When we built our chicken house, I staked out the 650 foot long pad on my own. When the dozer guy came out he couldn't believe how accurate it was. That was the geometry I learned in high school, because I hadn't been to college at the time. Figuring material...