Imagine you are a Montessori guide teaching a lesson (which may not be hard to do if you are already a Montessori teacher). You are sitting on the ground with the material on a rug, and the students sit around you with pencil and paper. During the lesson, there is some confusion on the part of the students. This is not your favorite lesson to teach, and this is reflected in the way you are presenting it. This is an advanced lesson, and its concepts are seemingly more esoteric than the typical. While plugging away through the lesson, a student raises their hand with a look on their face that reveals a mixture of boredom and confusion.

The student asks, “When are we going to use this in real life?”

It is almost painful for me to write. This one remark twists the knife in our hearts as educators. We may roll our eyes in frustration at the question, deep done we feel like we lost the students; that we failed to engage them, and they don’t care. What may feel even more dismaying is that the students sometimes bring up a valid point (which makes us question it as well).

What I want to tell the students is, “Don’t you understand that not everything we learn is meant to be used in “real life,” but can also develop us as a person? Learning is not solely for the pursuit of a job, and learning does not end when we get that job. Sometimes learning something for the sake of learning is enough; there does not need to be an ulterior motive. We don’t know what we need to know for the future, and if we limit of learning based on its usefulness, we may be limiting our potential foundation of knowledge. This could mean that we could miss out on our life’s calling because we didn’t know what we needed to know to get there. However, the idea that education must lead to financial gain has messed up how approach education, especially in colleges. Inflated grades, helicopter parents, and incredibly expensive tuitions for a degree with right name on it are all symptoms of this idea that sole purpose of education is for landing a high paying job. Maybe we did this to ourselves. We valued the dollar higher than anything else, and we stripped the joy of learning and replaced it as only a necessity; a means to an end.”

When a student asks when are we going to use this, we must read between the lines. Does the student truly want to know the real world application of the concepts of the lesson, or are they expressing something different. In my experience, students use when are we going to use this more as an insinuation of boredom. They are many reasons a student can be bored, but there is something that seemingly always overcomes boredom and provides inextinguishable energy to one who has it.

What that student needs is motivation.

The million-dollar question becomes, “how do get someone motivated who is not?” As educators, we try lots of different things to entice the children. Educators become actors dramatizing a lesson, follow-ups are unique and creative, and schools literally spend thousands upon thousands of dollars buying materials that capture the attention of the child. Yet, we don’t always get the enthusiasm or compliance that we hoped for.

Once place we do not see any issue with motivation is recess. Unless a student is feeling pressure to finish up some delinquent work, they always want to go to recess. When at recess, most students engage in some type of play, many times in the form of a game. Games seem to inspire an endless amount motivation in playing them, whether they are sports, board or card games, video games, or even make-believe games at recess. If we can harness that intrinsic power of unlimited motivation to play games, we can inject this motivation into classroom lessons and truly inspire learning through play.

Using games in the classroom is a consistent way of engaging the student and maximizing motivation for practice. However, the classroom is not always the most suitable environment to play engaging games with a class (especially with a lot of students) due to the constraint of the size of the classroom. Having another classroom suited to host lots of students with a plenty of space for movement (let’s say a gym or outdoor field) would work well for this type of activity. So it would stand to reason that the physical education classroom would be an excellent place to play games to inspire motivation for the student in the classroom.

To sum up the benefits of games for learning from my “Games May Be the Best Way to Learn” blog posts:

-       Students learn more when they play more.

-       People perform better working together, referred to as “collective intelligence”

-       “Games allow us to measure learning in ways we couldn’t before.”

-       Play can communicate ideas more effectively than language

-       Play sparks imagination

-       Games with integrated concepts will be learned better

-       Games build camaraderie

-       Players are internally motivated to play games