But We'll Never Use This in Real Life!

Is anything truly useless?

Every teacher has heard it before. It doesn't matter what subject you teach. It doesn't matter what grade. Somebody will pipe up during your lesson on poetic alliteration and exclaim, with all the injured dignity of an entitled teenager who got the wrong Starbucks order, "We'll never use this in real life!"

It might be spoken as a complaint, but it's really a challenge, and the teacher's response matters. If you ignore the challenge, or just steamroll the kid who raised it ("Johnny, if you talk out again, it will mean detention"), the whole class will see that as proof that your lesson really is useless. On the other hand, how can you explain, off the cuff, without derailing your whole lesson, that alliteration, or proper comma usage, or whatever, is worth learning? A ready response is needed, one that can be quickly stated and quickly understood.

But First, Some Philosophy

Before we craft that response, let's ponder the challenge a little more. The student feels like your teaching is a waste of time because he can't use it "in real life." Well what does he mean by "real life"? Presumably your class is real, and so is the test you'll be giving on this material next Tuesday. The student doesn't so much mean "real" life as he does "outside school" life. Now it may be the case that whatever you're teaching is obviously useful outside of school. If so, great! You already have an easy response to the challenge. You can now stop reading this blog post and go give your class an illustration about how fractions enable you to properly divide a birthday cake.

But what if your subject matter is not clearly valuable outside the world of grades, bells, and uniforms? If we're being honest as teachers, we have to admit that lots of things we teach are like that. They are "useless" in the sense that outside of school, you will never be required to do them. Unless little Johnny grows up to be an English teacher, he will not need to diagram sentences, construct analogies, or identify the rising action in a story. Does it follow that these things are not worth learning?

If we conceded that the only valid reason for learning something is because you will be required to do it later in life, we would reduce our education to a sorry state indeed. Think of all the amazing achievements of humanity that were not, strictly speaking, required: music and poetry, landing on the moon, inventing the internet! None of these things would have been accomplished if the people involved had learned only what information they would require "in real life" and nothing more.

Still, anyone can see that some things are a waste of time. If I spent a class period teaching the optimal way to sharpen a pencil, we might have grounds for doubting the educational value of my instruction. But how exactly do we judge that value? Being required for "real life" is not enough. We will never be required to sing the alphabet song we learned in kindergarten, recount the details of the Civil War we studied in 4th grade, or diagram the anatomy of a cell as we did in high school. But most teachers would agree these things are worth doing and knowing. Why?

The Response

The answer to that question, and the response to the impertinent "we're never going to use this in real life" can be derived from a simple illustration. Why do people go to the gym? (Feel free to ask your students that.) After all, unless they enter a very physically difficult profession, they're never going to use pushups, curls, or bench-presses "in real life." However, the activities at the gym provide training and conditioning which will help a person with every other part of their life. Similarly, many educational activities provide mental training and conditioning. You may not need to know specific facts about the Civil War in your day-to-day affairs, but being a historically literate person is a one mark of a well-trained mind. You don't need to know how to diagram a sentence, but being able to visually process and categorize information is a skill with lifelong value.

In short, when a student objects "we won't use this in real life," tell him that thinking is something that, you hope, he will be doing for the rest of his life, and this lesson will teach him how to think. You are providing a mental workout, and though it may be just as much drudgery as a physical workout, the benefits will be just as great, if not greater.