Week 7 Reply to James

Hi James,

So you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Totally agree!

Or is this picture more apt?

Sometimes I borrow a colleague's phrase for motivating students...for some reason, this phrase (and image) reaches college students.  We tell the students "we can only show you the door, you must walk through it." I feel kind of Dali-lama-ish typing this, but it captivates the students, for sure.

My teenagers say "why do I have to learn this, I will never use it", all the time.  I use my stock answer:  you're training your brain.  Literally, training your brain.  All knowledge may come in handy at some future point, but math will help you, EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE IT.  Math is a logic trainer (same for music, which is just awesome).  Learning math trains your brain!  You must learn it! :)  Consider stroke victims, establishing new pathways and then picture how math is busy carving out our future pathways for travel...our neuropathways are so cool!  

OK, so I might really love math, a little :)  Maybe science too...

Back to training your brain...week 3 of my Paranormal and Pseudoscience course covers ESP, telekinesis, telepathy, and the human brain.  We conduct an ESP experiment (here's the online version - do you have ESP?).  First we discover that we do NOT have ESP, telekinesis, or telepathy, sorry, believers :(   ...we then move on to current brain research, and what researchers believe we may unlock about the secrets of the brain, someday.  This video, CBC's the Dark Side of the Brain (which I first saw in Bill Hunter's POL course) absolutely captivates the students.  A woman in the video is using her mind to play video games, and is carving out new pathways in her brain, it's really, really cool.  Basically, we will, one day soon, control technology using a microchip implanted in our brains.  Think COD (call of duty) via microchip.  Talk about augmented reality!  We already have the technology available, and it's already in use to assist with exoskeletons designed for paralysis.

So James, you could tell your students that they're not learning math, they're carving out new pathways, they're training their brains (I'm LOLing)...

Of course if motivation is OUT...I know of one high school teacher who staples a Walmart application to every failing math test...