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When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.

Smoke and Mirrors by Sean Stayte

However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of answer:

• Because it’s a life-long learning skill.
• Because it’s a work-place skill you’re going to need.
• Because you need to understand this before we go on to that.

Really, though, haven’t I missed the point? By the time a student asks, “Why does this matter?”, I’ve already lost the PR battle, the differentiation battle, and the innovation battle. I haven’t engaged the student, found the right combination of content, process, and product, or bought myself instructional time with novelty. I’m willing to posit that students want and need clarification from time to time, but my answers are a habit, a conditioned response over time to repeated instances of, “Why does this matter?”

Why haven’t I asked students, why do you think it matters? Or why should it matter to you? Or how could you use this lesson today?

Is it a matter of trust or fear? Am I afraid that the honest and appropriate student response will be, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t care,” both of which translate in my mind to, “You haven’t helped me make the connection on my own.” Am I afraid that I’m pushing an irrelevant curriculum? Am I afraid that I’m not doing a good enough job with a relevant curriculum?

None of this is to say that planning relevance is easy, or that it should be. None of this is to say that together my students and I don’t ever get relevance right. Regardless, all of these questions need to be asked. As the teacher, I cannot be the sole determiner of relevance. It’s a resource to collect from students. It’s an energizing current that we need to tap into to provide electrifying instruction. It’s an attempt after which we need to celebrate shared successes and forgive ourselves instructional failures.

Relevance is like a sub-atomic particle. You have to watch for it, hope that it shows up, and try to determine which shade of gluonic quantum chromatics it embodies so you know how it will bind the quarks of how and why into the hadrons of what . Relevance is nothing at all like this paragraph (except for quantum mechanists, which goes to the point).

Today, for a half hour or so at a time, class by class, we got relevance right.

We’re making documentaries about United States history. We have expert coaches visiting us monthly. We have rudimentary production company pages for each group. We have the technology to pull off the project. Work proceeds apace, but until today it was missing a spark. Frankly, I suspect that our technology bought us strategic compliance.

Today we started a new campfire activity called “Video of the Day.” We gather around the old SmartBoard, play a “relevant” video, and then we reverse engineer the video’s script as a way to model writing and name the techniques the filmmakers used to hook us as an audience. The hope here is that by connecting relevant videos to scriptwriting, students will see scriptwriting as a way to communicate personally meaningful things, and that by analyzing the techniques successful filmmakers use to engage an audience, students will learn to use them, as well.

Here’s the video we used:

The video worked. It created relevance. We didn’t need to talk about why it mattered, because it did. Instead we talked about

• Moose Markowicz, my Algebra II teacher, who could be cajoled into telling stories for an entire period in the days of 47-minute classes.
• Why I don’t wear more T-shirts to work (mine are all too geeky).
• What we would do with our own gym in our own building (a rock-climbing wall, a Wii wall, and an American football/soccer hero wall).
• Whether or not you would use a new slug line or CUT TO when the image changes in a script, but the location does not.
• How the music and quick cuts held our attention.
• How the video took something we knew (Guitar Hero) and made it cooler (now with sick soccer players).
• How the incredibly talented players failed horribly, stuck with the problem sixteen more times anyway, changed how they played to help one another, and celebrated being good, but not perfect.

I wanted the video to work. I wanted it to be relevant. I wanted the gluons of relevance to put together the hadrons of content and process into the protons and neutrons of completed classwork. I was on the look-out, and I saw it. I saw relevance happen for the students and found some for myself.

Of all the things the video is really about, it’s really about the patience, dedication, and community needed to master learning in an authentic way. It’s about trying until you meet an personally meaningful goal, and then celebrating. It’s about depending on others. It’s about everyone playing a different part in a symphony of action. It’s about joy, and maybe that’s the relevance we should be differentiating for all the time.

NB: Differentiation is a powerful tool for creating relevance. See last night’s differentiation #edchat for all kinds of inspiration about what to try next on your students’ behalf.