4q Teaching Minds There are subjects that are school subjects and there are subjects that are life subjects and teenagers can tell the difference. They work harder at the life subjects. And, what is the difference between these two kinds of subjects? Goals. It is as simple as that. Instead of simply saying what is wrong with schools and what teenagers are really like in school, I want to take a different tack. Some teenagers wake up in the morning wanting to learn history or algebra but they are a very small minority of the school population. There is no minority, however, when it comes to dating or driving for teenagers. They all want to do these things. So the question I want to ask is: Are there other things that all teenagers want to do and are those things connected in some way with learning? Or, to put this another way, if school had been designed around something other than subjects, what would it have been designed around? Driving and dating, which we know are winners in a teenager’s world, could be seen as subjects, or they could be seen as instances of something else, and that something else might be something important to learn. Students everywhere might want to learn whatever that is and they would work hard to learn it. If we can turn the question around in that way, maybe we can design better learning situations for everybody. So, the question is: What are driving and dating instances of, with respect to learning? Or, to address this from the cognitive science point of view: What is it that students are doing when they learn to drive and date that they might be getting better at while doing those things? Can we view whatever it is they are getting better at as an example of the kinds of things we should want to teach and that students should want to learn? Answering these questions will allow us to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023750