I learned long ago that a teacher’s passion is the one thing that can ignite students to action and engagement. Left to their own devices, students appear to be more disinterested in a subject if being pumped up for it. I don’t care about blame so much as cause and the cause in this respect is a k-12 system that invests in memorization more than it does in installing basic principles of learning and moreover, a joy of learning and solving difficult problems. In short, if you give students a problem that doesn’t directly relate to what they spend the majority of their lives doing, the students don’t give a damn. Unfortunately, what they spend the majority of their time doing is distracting themselves and engaging in ‘worker bee’ behaviors. So what can be done?
This is the question that drives my course creation process.