It stands to reason that if we connect meaning and personal investment to what we want students to learn and know they WILL master it. We see that with them knowing song lyrics and titles, movie trivia and of course game trivia of all types, from electronic to actual team sports and many other things that interest them.
The challenge of course is creating lessons that connect that 'meaning' and the how and why they would/should want to learn "it" is where we are at today in society. Do we need to demonstrate and model that it is a 'mystery', that we don't know the answers ourselves and that they are the ones who need to discover or dig in and find the answers? Sometimes I think we just 'give and give' them info and since they haven't vested anything in it themselves, it is never learned for some and for others, after the test it is forgotten. I know, I know, this is hard to get them excited and pumped up but somehow this to me seems like the way to go for some, if not all, students.
When I was a classroom teacher for all subjects I was able to tie a lot of the concepts together which was a lot of work but really pretty successful. For instance when learning about Egypt in Social Studies, we would make projects such as pyramids and masks and other artwork, we had math lessons that related to Egypt and of course many writing opportunities. Of course there were still some students who struggled (with behavior mostly) but I believe they were more successful learning this way than to have all the subjects separate and not coorelated with each other.
I believe that personally connecting that information and standard that we want students to learn to the child's past and current experiences and future life has got to be one of the key points that will help students get excited about diving in and learning what we think they should know to be successful.
And THAT right there is the challenge! But I am hopeful that it can be done.
