Disengaged students?

Many years ago, I used to tutor Johnny. Johnny was a fourteen year old whose brain had been flooded with too much testosterone too quickly, which made him a bit careless about school.

One afternoon we had a session on geometry of objects. I would ask him, for example, “What’s the formula for calculating volume of a right circular cone?” and he would return “Did you know you can kill a vampire by driving a wooden stake through his heart?” After half an hour of back and forth like this I told him wooden stakes kill not only vampires, but annoying little brats, too, but that only made him laugh in his teenage breaking voice. So I tried something else.

“Hey Johnny, how big of a stake would you need to kill a vampire?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? How are you going to break free if a vampire captures you? You’d better be ready and know for sure.”

So we drew a stake on a piece of paper, estimated the depth of a vampire’s chest, and calculated the needed dimensions.

Then, we investigated if he could have the stake delivered by a pigeon, as vampires are vigilant and leave none lying around their lairs, and voilà! Without realizing, he had calculated the volume of a right circular cone, the topic of an upcoming math test.

The morale of the story is that it sometimes helps to package a topic that a learner finds irrelevant or boring into something they care about.