What is your compelling reason?

I just had the pleasure reading George Couros post where is says:

A reminder…when you have a compelling reason, you can learn anything.When you find your own inspiration to learn and grow, it is often that modeling that will help our students do the same.

I recently posted this challenge for my students; Why is this a class many describe as boring and difficult? What can we do to make young people see the relevance to their lives? Can we change the way we teach and assess? As we say in our district now; relevance, relevance, and relevance. Share your advice to all history teachers here!

Here is one of the answers:

However important our history is, there is a lot of it. Meaning that everything can’t be interesting. Students get excited by the opportunity to watch a movie, not reading or sitting through a lecture. Even though the material is interesting most students will not be thrilled to read about it in a book and that is perhaps why people find the class so difficult. Because it demands reading. 

Although it seems boring, it is obvious to many of us how relevant it is to our existence. But, some students, like I, are unable to see how it will come to use in our adult day-to-day lifestyle (depending on what you are going to pursue as a career in the future).

The way we are taught History in Norway today makes us unaware of how we will be able to use it in our future. We need a teaching system that gets us eager to learn and invokes our need for it. Or at least understand why. We receive large amounts of intricate information over short timespan and it doesn’t allow us to absorb it all. Yes, we are taught History from a young age, but what our teacher spoke about when we were younger is simple and doesn’t really give us the foundation we need to process the material in High School.  by, Leon, Runa, Bibbi

I think that is pretty much what George is discussing in his theme. And perhaps also Will Richardson when he says

Learners have always learned, and will always learn in the same way. They learn what they are interested in. They learn what they need to learn. They learn those things that they want to learn more about.

Any way you look at it, learning gets to be a whole lot more interesting and fun when you do it together with your classmates and you share a common purpose and goal. Reaching for the stars? Not always, but it sure looks good!  Like this video shared by George.