Back in school, English class was the one I hated most.
Shakespeare was so boring to me. Why learn the Old English and verse of someone writing hundreds of years ago? Even now I don’t want to read it, so why force kids to slog through something that dry? And then test them on it?
Here’s what I want for my kids:
- English class could read Harry Potter or Flowers for Algernon, instead of Shakespeare
- Chinese class could read Jin Yong’s The Smiling, Proud Wanderer or essay collections like 我與貍奴不出門, instead of Tang dynasty poetry and classical Chinese
- Math class could play Slay the Spire and watch 3Blue1Brown, instead of just doing drills
- Physics class could play Angry Birds and Portal, or watch Mark Rober, instead of just memorizing formulas
- Geography class could play GeoGuessr, instead of just memorizing capital cities
- History class could play Civilization, instead of just memorizing timelines
- Music class could play rhythm games like Maimai DX or Magic Piano, instead of just memorizing music theory
You might ask: why not just do all this outside of class?
But banishing the fun games and YouTube to “extracurricular” is itself telling kids that class should be boring, that learning should be boring.
The fun stuff gets learned the fastest.
And Shakespeare, classical Chinese, and the rest shouldn’t become required just because they’re classics. Whoever wants to learn them can take them as electives.
Learning should start from interest.
If they’re interested, they’ll dig in on their own, and you couldn’t stop them if you tried. If they’re not, cramming a pile of stuff just to pass a test and forget it the next day is backwards, no matter how good the grades look.
If my own English class had been Harry Potter instead of dissecting Shakespeare line by line, I wouldn’t have waited until after my master’s degree to start enjoying books in English, and my English would probably be many times better today. If I could spell “wingardium leviosa,” what English word could ever stump me?
And honestly, a decade or so from now, assuming humanity hasn’t wiped itself out, the competition my kids face when they enter the workforce will be an all-knowing AI and machines accurate to the millimeter.
No matter how good their grades are, no matter how much they’ve memorized, they won’t out-grind those.
So I don’t care one bit whether my kids get good grades.
I just want them to find learning fun.
