. . . if your spouse says, “I’m looking for ways to make you interesting and appealing,” that is not a good sign.
Once you look at a lesson and ask, “How am I going to make this material relevant,” you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that’s true–if the lesson is inherently irrelevant–then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it’s on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything. More importantly, no amount of stapling on pictures of movie stars will convince your students that you aren’t wasting their time, and wasting students’ time is one of the unforgivable sins in the teaching biz.
Know why you are teaching what you’re teaching. Know why the material has value for your students. This is not always obvious, but this is where your expertise in the subject matter is supposed to come in. You’re the teacher–you’re supposed to know what the connection is between your content material and the business of being fully human in the world. If you don’t see a connection, you need to go study and look to find it, or you need to reconsider whether you should be teaching it at all.
[Via www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/06/08/dear-teachers-please-dont-make-your-lessons-relevant — Found on Scott MacCleod's excellent blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, about the need to move schools forward into 21st century.]
The same is true of assessments. It's easy to come up with assignments that generate grades for a report card, that rank students against each other, but does the activity actually have anything to do with anything that matters? If the assessment isn't authentic, don't do it.
