Student Engagement with material and the extent of the material’s potential scope of relevance is to me one of the largest and important aspects of successful teaching. The primacy of importance that is “listener engagement” is not only so in the formal classroom however; while the teacher must have new, unique, but simultaneously relevant and required content, so too must the soccer coach provide new drills and strategy to keep their players developing and challenged while ideally remaining gleefully dedicated (ideally the player and coach alike). Approaching the orientation practicum I found myself always coming back to the question of how to make curricular material accessible and interesting, especially when taking into account the breadth of foci, age groups, experiences and the overall plurality in personality that comes standard in the 13-18 year old human.
The obvious solution was to build an arsenal, or in computer hacker language, to “brute force” the password that was the answer to my uncertainty. The idea being that with initial dedication, sharpened research skills and some street smarts I could build a sprawling portfolio of activities, analogies, metaphors, positions, hooks, introductions and every variable thereof, from without, and over time grow and become the Voltron of the teaching world. I was slightly intimidated by the grind that this understanding implied, but figured getting a decent portfolio together would take three to four years tops, which isn’t even as long as your run of the mill Bachelor’s degree, so no problem. As I started my practicum I had a few go to’s, nothing fancy; a think-pair-share here, a carousel there, and without forgetting I had a couple of days to just observe and soak it in (not to mention the entire internet for the time being), I felt good. By the end of my first lesson I had already realized that the scavenge and store method wasn’t enough: the go to’s get stale, the sure shots aren’t home runs; the more you send a line drive towards third, the faster the baseman gets the ball to first. I was missing something, I couldn’t deploy my admittedly small cache on the fly, it was too boxy, too rigid, and it didn’t allow me to think on my feet. There was something missing, it was like the car was running fine but the fuel was disappearing too fast. I debriefed with my S.A., finished the day, and headed home and onto the next one.
I wanted to unwind so I whipped up some pasta and threw on a little Star Wars a la Netflix. As I was watching that title sequence roll by I was thinking to myself how cool it would be if all updates, reviews, reminders, and introductions could roll by like that, to that music and with that background. It hit me at that moment, I had missed half the recipe to making a tasty lesson: sure I had the made the apps, mains, and deserts to the customers liking, heck, I had even wrapped up their leftovers to look like an aluminum foil swan, but I had forgot to do that most important thing that separates the Chef Boyardees from the Chef Bourdains. I hadn’t added my own spices; I hadn’t thrown in the things that made me passionate; I could make their favorite dishes until the cows came home but if I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing; if I wasn’t inspiring myself, then I wasn’t cooking with fire. The point is that its good, and even great to reflect on how to relate and frame things for them; but if students can’t relate to you, that is: if you don’t put some of your own brand in it, there’s nothing about your restaurant that makes them want to eat there. They’ll wind up going somewhere else in their head and doing all the cooking at home.
