How Can We Make Learning Fun?

[Willowz]

A short question. How to make learning a fun experience? I'm sure a lot of teachers deal with this problem in school or wherever...

 

[Willowz]

One thing that I think teachers (absolutely) must do is explain why this child is where he or she is.

They often treat school like some kind of punishment if their parents don't do the explaining for them.

 

[Klockan3]

Things are fun when you do them because you want to. So either you can combine learning with activities kids usually want to do or you make them want to learn. The traditional approach is to try to make them want to learn, which as we know only work on a fraction of the kids.

I'd say that the best way would be to do things differently in every new class hour, predictable isn't fun.

 

[QuarkCharmer]

I think it's critically important to explain why [the information] they are learning is important. What good is math, science, chemistry, whatever, when the students simply learn it because they have to, rather than learn it because they understand it's real applications and how they aid in the understanding of things even more beautiful.

I mean a better explanation than "You need math so you can balance your checkbook!", which is just about all the explanation I got in school.

 

[Disconnected]

I mean a better explanation than "You need math so you can balance your checkbook!", which is just about all the explanation I got in school.

Yeah, once we started to learn calculus I was terrified of starting my own checking account.

Personally I think the only way of making learning "fun" is to let people learn thing that are relivent to their interests. Now on a basic level I think everyone should be encouraged (read: forced) to try all the subjects, but I think open choice is the way forward in later years. The problem is, of course, that many people will flood into the easy classes. I guess the only way to stop that is to make those classes harder. If the material is easy, then higher volume would compensate.

I mean, look at university level studies, where people are completely free to choose their courses. Very few people have several classes they hate. Maybe some that they find hard and dislike, or ones they like less then others, but not that they hate hate.

I know this is skewed, as the people who go to university do so because they have an interest in the subject, but the same thing is noticable in the final years of the Scottish system, where only 3-5 courses are taken.

 

[Chi Meson]

A short question. How to make learning a fun experience? I'm sure a lot of teachers deal with this problem in school or wherever...

I've gotten mostly positive reviews from my students of this past 12 years of teaching. I try really hard to keep things fun while taking Physics seriously.

But it has started to become the "Mr. C Show!" It can be utterly exhausting being "on" every day, for six hours a day, five days a week, and trying to include 70 to 100 students in on the "fun."

Then, some students only remember the handful of occasions when you lose it...

Anyway, "How to do it": I picked up a line from our sage, Richard Feynman: know exactly what you want the students to know and why you want them to know it. Add to that, for each unit that you are currently teaching (e.g. "Circular Motion"), be utterly convinced that this is the most important bit of information the students will ever come across.

 

[mathwonk]

get to know the student first. rather than imposing the learning on them, find out what interests them, and then relate the subject to their interests. E.g. as a tiny beginning i often asked my students on the first day of calculus or geometry what their major was. Then afterwards I tried to relate the subject to those fields.