“Anything But Ordinary”: Cambridge Teachers Get Creative in the Classroom
Teachers are using teaching methods that deviate from the traditional classroom experience.
Most students, (at some point in their life), have sat through a class in which the teacher is boring them to death, and all they want to do is turn their attention to their friends and phones.
This presents an age-old question for teachers: How do I make this interesting?
To answer this question, teachers sometimes use methods that deviate from the traditional classroom experience.
“I try to find something to connect to because otherwise, everything is just super dry,” said Economics teacher Bryan Wallace.
Wallace was recently trying to teach his students the law of diminishing marginal utility, which states that the more you do something, the less appealing it is to you.
For example, companies may use measures of marginal utility to inform their decisions about how much customers will consume of a product, and therefore, how much they may want to produce or at what price they might want to sell.
To illustrate this, Wallace had a student drink an entire two-liter bottle of soda. The student drank, threw up and then proceeded to drink the rest of the soda.
As the student drank more and more soda, the marginal utility diminished, as each sip brought him less and less additional satisfaction.
Wallace displayed the effectiveness of this atypical lesson by having two of his students describe, on the spot, the concept of diminishing marginal utility to a Bear Witness reporter.
“It’s a complicated class, with a lot of complicated principles, so if you can work these examples into the class, I think they remember it more,” Wallace said.
Science teacher Amber Miller likes to do labs that relate to students living in this day and age. For example, her AP Environmental Science classes looked at cars in both the teacher and student parking lots to explain the concept of biodiversity.
Students measured the number of brands of cars, within the parking lots to represent species richness, and they measured the number of cars within each brand to represent species evenness. The students then used these two measurements to calculate the biodiversity of each lot. When you interact with the material, you understand it more. — Science teacher Amber Miller
“When you interact with the material, you understand it more,” Miller said.
Miller said because teachers are sometimes short on instructional time, they often find that creatively using students’ devices can help them in the classroom as well.
Miller records herself narrating and annotating PowerPoints, which allows her students to work at their own pace. Rather than using other teachers’ resources, she prefers to do it herself.
“I just think it’s better if it’s your teacher,” said Miller.
Sometimes teachers pull pop culture into the classroom, as a way of engaging their students.
English teacher Jesse Greener has her students watch movies and sometimes even television in class as a part of her lessons.
Before reading Lord of the Flies, students watched an episode of Lost to draw real-life parallels to the novel.
“It’s a similar thing,” Greener said about the plotlines of the novel and television show. “To see the same things translate visually is useful.”
All of these unusual methods of teaching aim to relate the subject material back to today’s students, (who have constant access to entertainment and who demand to be completely interested in what they are doing at), every moment.
The goal is to put something off the beaten track every day. I think that keeps the class relevant.
— Economics teacher Bryan Wallace
“The goal is to put something off the beaten track every day,” said Wallace. “I think that keeps the class relevant.”