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Personal relevance examples are given in order to make lessons and information meaningful for students. Personal connections to material will help retention of material as well as motivate student willingness to learn.

One thing that came to mind when I read this article was a technique of vocabulary instruction that my school has been using for the past few years. It is called the "Marzano" method of instruction (named after Robert Marzano) which asks students to give their own impression/explanation of a new term before it is used in class. I often like using this technique for vocabulary in Physics that has a contemporary meaning aside from how we will be using it in our course. One great example is "Resistance" in circuitry. I will ask the students (as per the Marzano method) to write down a description or explanation of this word, then I will go around and record the results from random students around the room. The 'group' consensus definitions are then combined to come up with the 'official' or 'technical' definition of the word. It's amazing to see how many students have odd connections to words that help explain the science meaning of the word. Once I had a student bring up the idea of resistance meaning a "rebellion" or "uprising" of sorts. In electrical terms that is not the 'true' definition, but having the students visualizing the electric conductor 'fighting back' against the electron flow can easily guide students to the more appropriate usage of the word. This way, students can see that these 'new' terms are ones that they already have an inkling of understanding for. Their understandings are not useless, but rather need to be expanded upon as we learn more about our content.

This seems a really excellent support for the PBL model of instruction - providing real-world context to the material of a class motivates learning, and allows students to activate prior knowledge. See also the another edutopia article: http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-student-motivation

This article is very timely it talks about the NCLB law and how it isn't working. Threats to teachers firing, closing schools and students still continue to decline. Standardized testing isn't working. This is a great article, must read.

Poverty in America greatly effects our children, in cities like Detroit, Chicago etc. Place and poverty are tightly woven together and add to our problem. This is a good article on our inner city kids.