Working with At-Risk Youth: Why do we have to do this?

The importance of cultivating an atmosphere of choice feeds right into the big question: “Why do I have to learn this stuff?” And hopefully you, the teacher, can answer that! Real-life applications are important to all students, but especially the at-risk ones. For a variety of reasons, most live in a world that only recognizes the here and the now (as opposed to delayed gratification—where you’re working at something for a really long time and eventually you’ll see where it all comes together and pays off). Delayed gratification may have worked well for you (especially if you have advanced degrees), but for most of your students, this is as foreign as another galaxy. When you don’t know where you’re doing to live next week, or whether or not you’ll have food at all during the last week of the month, or whether or not your mom is going to be deported at any moment, well it kind of puts a premium on what you can accomplish TODAY. And it’s not just your students who are thinking along these lines. Society is currently enamored with instant gratification, so many of your students come with this mindset too, but we teachers are mostly in the business of work now, play later. What this means is that students want to know, what can I do with this here and now? If you can’t answer that, you may have lost half the room already. Depending on what you are teaching, you may have to figure out how you can sell it to students coming from this mindset. The good news, is no matter what you are teaching, there are aspects of any discipline that are so inherently interesting, that you won’t have any trouble drumming up interest for your subject area. The tricks is to start seeing the world through the eyes of your students, and find out what things they find useful, motivating, and fascinating. And use this to your advantage (as a gateway) to ensure they stick around when you have to do the “other stuff” too.

Almost any subject has here and now applications. What you’re leaning towards is hands-on real-life examples of your discipline in action. Almost any abstract concept, has a counterpart somewhere in the concrete day-to-day lived experience of your students. The trick is to start thinking about academics in terms of life experiences. For instance in math, you can measure all kinds of things—and they don’t have to be boring book examples of measurement. Measure the things people know intimately and care deeply about. Talk about money—the kids need to know more about that anyway, and as teens, they’re definitely interested in that. Study astronomy, where the really big numbers happen! These are just a few examples. Better yet, start getting interdisciplinary. Some of the most engaging lessons and units I’ve ever seen were interdisciplinary and combined multiple subjects (reading, science, life skills, etc). If you teach in a traditional setting, figure out what the other teachers are doing, and connect with that so that your students get more exposure to the same topic from different angles. For instance, take WWII—history teachers will obviously explore the historical implications, but science teachers could take on some of the technological developments that occurred at that time, Reading/Language Arts teachers can read novels from the perspective of various sides, and in math there’s a lot of opportunity to use the data regarding casualties, money spent, etc.