What would you do to make School more useful to your life and turn you on to learning?

I think this is a question we all as teachers have thought about many times. Here is my opinion/answer:

The main thing I would do is engaging students to participate in their own learning process and making them aware of their own progress. A very interesting system to do so is the self-evaluation of the activities implemented in class. A crucial thing is the teacher to give them feedback and guide them to discover their strengths or their weaknesses by themselves. In addition, the “lateral thinking” is a technique which enables students solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. All these ways of operating inside a classroom help students to be more organized, attentive and critical, which will help them in their future lives.

Another very important thing I would do is to adapt the boring contents into real life situations, in order to increase the interest and motivation. This is for the students to understand that they are in school learning things that they would lately use in the real world surrounding them. Related to this, I would also promote the individual learning, which means the students to learn/investigate what they are more interested in/curious about.

Other things would be shorting down the time of each lesson with brain breaks, promoting more active lessons (working in groups, role-plays, drama, songs...) or engaging parents in their children learning process.