When will I ever need to use this in real life?

At some point or another, we have all been tasked with performing mundane work in school or by our parents that we have felt was a waste of our time. You know the routine; the teacher/ parent provides instruction with directions for what to perform and how to perform the task, but never quite gives full disclosure as to why it was important to perform the task. It often made me feel as though the reason behind enduring this secret work was to be included in a secret initiation at the end of the day or it provided a form of entertainment for the person demanding me to perform the work.

NEW LEVEL, NEW DEVIL

When I was in grade school, I remember one of the weekly assignments was to complete a four-paragraph current-event report. When I went to middle school, those current events became book reports. In high school, our top weekly assignments became bibliographies. When I studied for my MBA, I had weekly annotated-bibliographies due. Finally, when I became a PhD student, my weekly assignment became literature reviews to learn about pioneering infrmation I needed to include in my dissertation. I’m sensing a pattern here...

What teachers fail to tell you is that the assignment they are giving you, just evolves into some new level where you will have to face an improved version of what they are asking of you. There really is levels to this.

THE STUDENT

My friend Sam says, “Everything you go through is preparing you for a future experience.” He believes that you have to learn a skill in order to sharpen your senses enough to know when it is appropriate to implement the information for which you have been equipped. Everything in life is connected. The key is to be open-minded enough to want to equip yourself with information that can be useful to your future self. How do you know what information will be useful for your future self? Ask yourself three (3) questions:

1. What interests you?

2. Who is your future self?

3. Is this relatable?

My cousin Tyrone believes that a student can determine how information can be useful to them by determining what will be useful to developing their skill set. Learning what each weapon can do will prevent you from working harder and instead allow one to work smarter. Sure, you can use a pistol to take out a zombie; but if you had a grenade, you can wipe out the source of the zombie apocalypse before it makes its way to your neighborhood. But you would'nt know how to strategize a grenade attack or the power of a grenade unless you paid attention in history class especially during the WWI lesson. Learning something new will arm you with the critical thinking skills necessary to solve your problems from mindset that has multiple solutions instead of taking your traditional approach. The other point Tyrone determined during our conversation is for the learner to be curious enough to explore the area from a more granular perspective.

THE TEACHER

After teaching chess to a variety of different people, I learned that perspective is pivotal when teaching someone something important. To achieve teaching from an interest-based perspective, the teacher must become the student. A teacher must find rapport with their students. Once rapport is established, a good teacher will be able to relate aspects of what they are teaching to the interests of their students.