Unless you are an avid country music fan, you
probably used your smart phone or the computer you are sitting at right now to
find the answer (which is what I would’ve done 20 years ago when I was asked
the same thing, if smart phones existed and if the internet wasn’t on dialup).
So now you are wondering where am I
going with this and how does it relate to school. At the time, the rest
of my classmates in my 7th grade World History Class were wondering the same
thing while we sat in the library. The only prior knowledge we had of
Hank Williams Jr. was that he sang the intro for Monday Night Football. If you took the time to research the initial question you found the answer. However,
if you took the time to ascertain how the original question was relevant to
world history you accomplished what we as educators need to strive for with
our students. Success in school
will be determined not by how many answers you know, but by what you do when
you don’t know the answer.
The responsibility we have as educators is not to teach our students facts or
processes, it is to educate our students how to problem solve. The
scenario above was example of how new information can be introduced through
Problem-Based Learning. Problem-Based Learning is when new content is
introduced in the context of solving a problem that elicits reasoning and is
an area the Common Core State Standards requires our students to be adept in.
In the last few months of instruction, try Problem-Based Learning in your
classroom if you haven’t already. See if you can relate what you are
about teach to something the students can relate to.
If you didn’t take
the time to find the answer to the original question it was Bocephus. Which was
the southern way (I’m from Oklahoma) of pronouncing Bocephalus, which was the
name of Alexander the Great’s horse.
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