I recently had the opportunity to escort an executive director of secondary education through multiple high school and middle school programs. This executive director, comparable to what most districts call assistant superintendent, set aside hours for the tour. I learned a lot.

Imagine a student learning Shakespeare. In your imagination, is this learning relevant to the student? Is she deeply engaged or, perhaps, utterly bored? Strong teachers know how to engage students in learning topics that might otherwise seem irrelevant. They connect the topic under study to something familiar to the student, such as their local community, ethnic background, or favorite hobbies.

In today’s world, information is readily available at our fingertips. With a simple search, we can access an endless stream of facts, figures, and opinions. This unprecedented access to knowledge has transformed the way we interact with the world, but it also raises questions about the relevance of traditional education, which often places a heavy emphasis on memorization and rote learning.

In the flickering glow of screens that connect and dictate our modern lives, amidst the unending stream of notifications and updates, there lies an unspoken yearning for the eternal truths that have guided humanity for millennia. As we stand at the pinnacle of technological achievement, we find that our most sophisticated gadgets offer little in the way of understanding the heart’s simplest desires—to love and be loved, to live passionately and purposefully.

As a teacher education student, thirty years ago, I learned that students learn in one of three ways – visually, auditory, or kinesthetically. This does not mean that they only learn in one way. Rather, they have a dominant learning style, though they can also learn in one of the two other ways. Though this was not immediately clear to me as a young teacher, I still remember a discussion with a graduate school professor when she helped me understand that there is a major difference between learning as it is meant in this theory and conceptualization or critical thinking. Learning, in learning theory, only means ingestion of information. Somehow the information about which students will think needs to get into their brains.