What is your monster truck?

Post date: Oct 4, 2017 12:57:59 AM

I have a three year-old son, Hayden. Anybody with young children know how fascinated they can become with certain things; sometimes this fascination lasts a few minutes and other times it can take root and last a lifetime. Right now, as I type this, Hayden is putting on a monster truck show in the living room. His show is complete with about eight monster trucks, a haphazard ramp, five smaller “hot wheels” type cars, and commentary…this has been going on nightly for about three weeks.

It is amazing to me how engrossed and engaged children can get in certain things. He is literally creating this story with a plot (makeshift as it may be), character voices, emotion (two of his trucks were hugging because they are friends and love each other), and he is almost completely oblivious to what is going on around him. I would venture to say this as close as a three year-old can get to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow..

The reason I decided to write about this is not to highlight the nightly occurrences of the last several weeks. As I watch how engulfed Hayden is in his new interest, as an educator I cannot help but think of the students we serve and their ‘monster truck’. Do you, do I, know what my students’ interests and passions are? Does the school or education as an institution care? Should it? Should you or I?

Go into any school and you will undoubtedly hear about an ‘unmotivated’ student somewhere in the building. Are these seemingly ‘checked out’ students not motivated? Or are they just not interested in what we are forcing them to endure day-in and day-out? Are these students outliers or are the other students in the building also uninterested but are just really good at compliance and thus we mistake this for motivation and interest?

By incorporating students’ interests and passions I do not mean the superficial inserting a student’s name or favorite candy into the day’s story problem. Students should get time during the day, or at least during the week, to explore and create based on their interests in passions. This should have a place within the school where students have access to abundant-hopefully-resources both material and intellectually from peers and teachers. This idea of ‘genius hour’ or ‘20% time’ has been explored and written about extensively. I envision, perhaps a later entry, for a school and education system based primarily on interests, passions, and authentic learning problems.

My main reason for writing tonight is to highlight that our students are motivated, can stay “on task”, have interests, and have passions. These ideas just may not be what we, or ‘they’, deem as important and essential; but who are we to determine that? We forget what it was like to be a student and be turned off by a teacher or content forcing knowledge upon us we were not interested…show of hands for those who don’t “like” history? Math? Reading? Maybe, just maybe, we can win back the “unmotivated” students and the others who are compliant but disengaged/disinterested in what school has to offer if we take the time to truly engage our students’ “monster trucks”.