A favorite opening question of mine in designing professional development workshops for teachers is this: What do you struggle with the most as a teacher? And the answers are almost always the same:
- Students are apathetic, unmotivated, or disengaged.
- Students don’t value education.
- Parents aren’t supportive.
- Kids don’t believe in themselves.
- Kids are distracted by technology.
During a presentation for K-12 teachers, a man stopped me during the break to ask me when I was going to get to the point in the workshop where I talk about how spoiled kids are. “They need to understand that in the real world no one is going to care about their ideas,” he said. “Are you going to show us how to tell them that?”
