The best way to make learning fun (or at least engaging) is to find a way to help students relate to what is being taught. One of the biggest factors that contributed to boredom in my own education was the fact that teachers often seemed to overlook students' need/wish to see how the material applies to them and/or their life or world.

A glaring example is my seventh-grade science teacher. He was not a bad teacher (and I wasn't a bad student); but as he stood up and announced that we would be learning about the amoeba, he failed to offer the very basic information about where an amoeba could be found. Being a science teacher, he could easily have not realized that some of us had never heard of an amoeba before, of course. Still, as I went about learning about the nucleus and the fact that an amoeba reproduces by simply dividing itself, I kept wondering where an amoeba could be found.

As stupid as this seems now, I wondered if an amoeba could be found in the air, on plants, or on our skin.

As the days wore on, and he didn't mention where, exactly, one would find an amoeba, I did not have the courage to raise my hand to ask; because by that time I would have looked stupid not to have asked days earlier. We moved on to the paramecium, and this teacher never mentioned where a paramecium could be found either. I learned all the parts of an amoeba, paramecium, and any other simple life form and did well on all the quizzes, but it would have been more engaging if the teacher had done a better job of helping the class understand what an amoeba or paramecium do in this world and where such things are found. (Ironically, I found myself working with an infectious disease group years later, providing information on amebiasis, which is, of course, the medical condition that occurs when amoeba find their way to the intestines after someone drinks contaminated water.)

Then there were the history and social studies teachers, who placed emphasis on memorizing dates and names. Some expected students to supplement this memorization by reading everything else in the book on their own. Textbooks are not known for being the most engaging reading in the world, so I came to see history and social studies as a matter of either boring memorization or boring reading.

As a student, I, for one, hoped I'd get teachers who were lively and interesting. I saw teachers' using class time for anything other than interesting discussion as wasting precious class time.

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