Orson Welles made a great point, get an audience interested, and they can understand ANYTHING.

 He was talking showbiz, movies, plays. But I immediately realized the same insight applied to education.

 I wrote a little tribute to Orson Welles, as last month was the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Let me set this up with a contrast. The big shot elite educators live inside of a  parallel universe. It's made up of abstractions, jargon, weird psychological claims, fads, supposed research-based practice that violates  every shred of  historical experience and common sense.

 But they rarely connect back to the desired phenomenon of a teacher explaining X in a way that children will never forget X.  It's as if they don't want to get their hands dirty with actual knowledge. What they want is to talk about a sort of Platonic experience where every lesson is well-intentioned and every student is well-adjusted.

 You hear a lot of talk about cohesive curriculum, 21st century skills, mapping the curriculum, authentic assessment, standards of every conceivable kind. However, as you wade through this, you will find it virtually impossible to imagine that a child is ever at any point INTERESTED.

http://www.examiner.com/article/orson-welles-smart-advice-for-the-e...