New answers for old questions
A few days before the holiday break, I stumbled in to the middle of one of the most cliche situations that can occur in a public school. A colleague was teaching a geometry lesson (or maybe a trigonometry lesson) to a group of less-than-enthused students. One of the students asked the classic "when am I ever going to need to know how to do this?"
Reacting instinctually, I popped in to the room and together with my colleague spewed off a list of various real-life situations where geometric/trigonometric knowledge could come in handy. This is, of course, the classic response mode for this particular question. In this way, the students, my colleague, and I reenacted a scene that has played out in various forms since the inception of compulsory education in this country. And while our response was classical in style, it was only after I left the room that I realized that we had gone about handling the situation in the wrong way entirely. Not that we shouldn't have addressed the complaint, but that we should have addressed the complaint from a completely different approach. It seems to me that the best answer to the "when am I ever going to need to know how to do <x>?" is not a direct response, but instead it should go something like this:
"Why should it matter?"