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After our meeting yesterday. I couldn't help but wonder how a teacher can appeal to the whole class without excluding anyone. It's hard enough to match the course cirriculum to topics that are related to student interests. Where do you draw the line to decide what is acceptable (in terms of the % of students engaged in the topic) to continue teaching without compromising the other students who's interests are not met?

Also, the articles about trial and error experiments and how to use that to engage students seems like an interesting approach as Luisiana mentioned, but my concern is again, what are the limits to this experimental approach? I know after trying to do a puzzle for a long time I start getting frustrated and that prevents me from getting anything out of it. What is a good balance between letting the students learn through experience and having the teacher teach?