This post serves as a letter to myself in the future if I ever decide to become a better teacher. ALSO I recognize that I am one individual student with my own learning needs. People have different things they each need to excel!

Teaching the context

I wish that teachers placed more emphasis on the context surrounding any arbitrary topics. As a student, it’s hard to engage myself with the course content when I don’t even know why we’re learning it. What makes it useful? What problem does it solve?

And by “why,” I’m not referring to understanding the derivation of a formula before using it. I want to know why people came up with the formula to begin with. What made this formula so important that they wanted to teach it to students in school?

When they’re already taking so many other courses, understanding the system in which a piece of knowledge exists can greatly help students mentally organize that information, further contributing to the learning process. I want to be able to associate my course content with its purpose and story, not purely for interest’s sake, but also because it actually helps me understand the material better. So many times have I just been faced with a full whiteboard of greek letters and numbers, not understanding a single bit of how we got to that point.

Of course, this is hard to do with certain ultra-theoretical topics, but even a very far-fetched example of an application of that knowledge would give students a minimum baseline to work off of as they struggle through the muckier details.

Break up the lectures

In high school, our periods were 80 minutes long, with 10 minutes in between periods. I imagine that this longer period of time was intended to help students reap the benefits of their “flow state.” Admittedly, this is really helpful during classes that are predominantly work periods.

This DOESN’T work when the whole class is just 80 minutes of straight lecturing (for me at least xd). Especially given that most students will have a few courses they aren’t as passionate about, this quickly turns into torture, diminishing the effectiveness of any teaching being delivered. Please give students some dedicated time in-between to stretch, go for a walk, refill their waterbottles, use the washrooms, or anything else.

Of course, this is just me. Some wizards have the magical ability to maintain their focus for however many hours in a row, but from personal experience, most people need time to reset.

Conclusion

Ultimately, however, these are only things that may benefit students who learn in the same way that I do. These wishes could very well hinder another student from receiving a similarly quality education, and so I think that teachers should ultimately just ask their students what they prefer—ideally in an anonymous survey so as to prevent anyone from feeling a pressure to conform.