Take me Back to 1st Grade
Why Students Need to Start Enjoying School Again
Did your love for learning stop once you hit middle school? For many people it does. In elementary school, learning was fun, but once students enter the higher grades learning becomes all about the results. Although the pressures of standardized testing drain all the fun out of learning when we get older, it is still possible to find ways to make school enjoyable again.
Enjoyment and Memory
In elementary school, teachers make learning fun. They make spelling into games, math into puzzles, and science into hands- on project. All these things help students become passionate about what they are learning in school so they remember the information better.
Judy Willis, in her article “The Neuroscience of Joyful Education,” expresses how kids see school once it becomes all about doing well on tests and how the change impacts students’ views on school. All the pressure from standardized testing make teachers eliminate the games and become more serious with their teaching styles. Willis says,” when we scrub joy and comfort from the classroom, we distance our students from effective information processing and long-term storage. Taking away the fun of learning actually has an impact on the information that kids remember because they are more liking to remember a certain concept if they enjoyed learning about it. For example, I remember learning about the cell parts in fifth grade because I got to do a creative project about cells where I made a cell and all its parts from items around my house. Even today I can picture the cell I made and all the materials I used. I am almost positive I learned more about cells from this project in fifth grade than I did this semester in my biology lecture. The cell project helped me remember the cell parts to this day.
Results Take Away Enjoyment
The main reasons students lack the love for school and learning as they get older is the focus on testing and results.
Testing starts to become an issue in about the third grade because some states begin to give state-wide tests. These tests no only look at the math and reading levels of students, but put pressure on teachers to get their students to learn all the necessary material. When teachers feel the need to crack down in order to meet requirements, they make their students more stressed. Ken Bain’s “Managing Yourself” gives insight on how students react when standards and results become factors:
“Grades create extrinsic motivators that reduce intrinsic interest. Students often work for the teacher rather than for themselves. They do ‘assignments’ and meet ‘requirements’ rather than pursue goals.”
The pressures to meet standards and get the best grades possible cause students to lose interest in what they are learning, and then they do not remember what they even leaned. Students, especially in college, need to focus their learning on the knowledge they want to acquire so that they can reach their goals and have fun while getting their education.
Bringing Back the Fun
When students have fun learning they are actually more successful because they can remember the skills and information that was being taught to them. Things such as hands-on experiments in a lab setting and a jeopardy game to memorize key terms can make learning more enjoyable. Another things students can do to change up their learning environment is acting out the things they are learning. Bain did a study based on Cold War History classes where students took on the roles of characters who lived during or participated in the Cold War. He found that simulation caused the students to gain a deeper understanding of the Cold War and made them more interested. Although middle school, high school and college professors may make school boring and tedious by giving lectures, papers, and tests, it is still possible to make school interesting. Students can try taking classes that will help them reach their personal goals and classes that they are curious about in order to like school. They can also make their learning and studying into fun by making quizzes with friends, doing their own experiments and extra research or anything else that sparks their interest.
Students can also travel to placed they are learning about or participate in situations where they can apply the skills they learned. If students are able to find other ways than just sitting in a classroom to learn the necessary material, they will remember more about what they are learning and will enjoy it more because they will find other connections. It is in the hands of students to make their own learning experiences enjoyable.
References:
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University,2012. Print.
