Passion is silly

This is what people often say when I tell them that my high school will prioritize student passions.

To some people, student passion is fleeting and based on teenage whims, that “as we know”, cannot be trusted. To them, the question is: why build an entire school around such a fluffy aspect of a student’s life?

So my challenge, in pitching and presenting my schools to others, has been to explain why it’s silly that many schools DON’T prioritize student passions.

The hard part is that, after years of seeing what happens when you don’t do this, it’s fairly obvious to me why leveraging student passion is essential. It sometimes feels like trying to explain to a baby how to speak…

Here are a few things that have been helpful:

1. Use student examples
   Share stories of real students who have become more engaged and feel more valued in school as a result of your intervention (or what you think would happen and why).
   For example, I ran an after school program for students to work on passion projects (i.e. choose a topic you want to learn more about, learn about it, and then produce an artifact that demonstrates your learning) and every day, when they could’ve been at McDonald’s hanging out with friends, my students came early to get started on their projects and even invited their friends to join.
2. Connect passion to professional and adult skills
   In grade school, students are expected to do what we tell them to do when we tell them, but once they become working professionals, they’ll be expected to identify problems and solutions with minimal direction. In order for them to do this work effectively, students need to start now exploring the problems they’re passionate about, so they have a better sense of the problem space and have already created solutions that they can build on later.
3. Anticipate rebuttals
   Figuring out what reasons people will have to give you side-eyed glances (or, “yea right… we’ll see if you can get it to work…”) about the merits of your idea comes from telling lots of people about your idea and seeing how they respond. One safe place to have these conversations is with your Uber driver. They’re often quite friendly and socially aware people, so they might have great insights on how your idea would work with families. Plus, you’ll be in and out of their car in 10 minutes, so if the conversation gets awkward or you’re not sure what to say, you can relax knowing that it’ll soon be over.

What are some elements of your school’s model that you find hard to explain? How have you approached tackling it?