Useless information

The other day I read an article from Psychology Today by Peter Gray.  (Link: Article)  I found it fascinating.  The simple point was that if we teach students information and the student's brain considers it of no use to them then the student will discard that information.  I think I always knew this but never really thought about how it should affect my teaching.

I teach at a school that really values standardized tests.  The process of preparing for standardized tests is drilling information that the student finds mostly useless so that they remember it for a couple weeks.  One of the things that we are very concerned with at our school is our "summer loss."  Every year we find that our students forget a lot of what they learned over the summer according to our standardized tests.  Given Peter Gray's article it is no wonder that a school like ours has very high "summer loss."

I started to think about it a little bit in my life.  Obviously I am like every other person that has ever gone to college and have taken math classes that I now know nothing about about and then there is the seven years of Spanish I took, but I wanted to reflect on what I remember.  I love to garden.  Growing peppers and other vegetables takes up most of my summer.  Every year I do not garden for 6 months, but I never forget anything that I have learned over the prior summers.  I know when, where, and how to grow almost any crop I have grown.  Why?  Because my brain deems that information to be relevant to my life and it stores it.  Makes sense.

So here is the bombshell I figured out this summer...everything that I teach in the upcoming year needs to be deemed relevant or contextual to my students or I am wasting my time.  Wow.  That is quite a challenge.  Have you looked at a math textbook recently?  Nothing in it is relevant or in much context.

It is quite the challenge but it is one I am looking forward to.  Thank God for guys like Dan Meyer that have done a lot of the work for me.  Do you guys have other sources that may help me?