X Interest

James (1899/1962) focuses on the topic of holding students’ interest while teaching.  He stresses the importance of associating a new object with a native interest, so that the new object can be acquired as an interest, and the two objects together will be stronger than either was before.  He also adds that incorporating new interests with old ones can combine to create a comprehensive system.

Two passages caught my eye in this section, so I wanted to comment on both.  The first is slightly less important, so let’s begin there.  James (1899/1962) provides an anecdote about how a student watches a teacher with the utmost attention, only to later reveal that he was watching how her “upper jaw did not move once!” (p. 47).  This is something that teachers and any public speakers should keep in mind while lecturing.  While there are some things that we can in no way control (such as how our upper jaw moves), there are many things that distract our students that we can avoid.  One example that immediately comes to mind is an English teacher I had in high school.  She was a great instructor, but she had a terrible habit to interject the phrase “you know” constantly in her lectures.  At one point, a friend and I decided to keep a tally of how many times she said the phrase in a class period, and she managed 110+ times in a 50-minute lecture.  For that class session that we kept tally, we did not hear a word of what she was trying to convey.  We all have our tics and habits that can distract our listeners, and we should all work to eliminate these from our speech.  One great thing about technology is that we can now easily record and replay our lectures, to see what kinds of tics we might have.

Now let’s move on to the more significant connection.  Interest may be one area that students and teachers struggle with the most.  Students struggle to keep interest in their studies, even if they know they want to succeed, and teachers struggle to keep their students interested and engaged in the subject matter.  Many teachers fail at stimulating interest in the students, but some teachers really do have a natural ingenuity for allowing “the shuttle of interest [to] shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a lively and entertaining way” (James, 1899/1962, p. 48).  One instructor whom I remember having this skill was my high school Physics teacher.  He never really mentioned Physics at all; instead, he came up with fun projects for us to produce, such as potato guns, trebuchets, and miniature roller coasters.  He provided us the supplies and some tips on how to get started, and then would help us along as we came to issues in our design.  Even when he provided the formulas, he would often do it in a way that did not hint that we were learning.  For example, to teach us about volume and displacement, he told a story about how his bathtub overflowed when he put his dog in it to give him a bath.  Because of his teaching style, we never realized we were learning physics until after our projects were built, when he would review everything we had learned.  It always came as a surprise to see that we had covered three chapters in our textbook while building a fun project.  His skill in teaching us when we did not even notice that it was occurring was one that I will always remember, and I hope that I too can possess.  This technique is great for Science or Math classes where physical projects can be completed, but what about English or History classes? What other creative ways can instructors hold their students’ interest, while subtly providing powerful instruction along the way?