Being used and Being useful

The idea of writing this text came when I was coming back home after work, in a moment when many thoughts "downloaded" into my mind, a huge brainstorm.
I was listenign some music in which the chorus says "I don´t wanna be used, I wanna be useful" and many students questions such as "why this is important?" came to my mind and I started thinking about those questions and this sentence. It came to my mind exactly this, students wanna learn USEFUL things.
Let me give you an example, in the school I work for as a coordinator there is a lesson that basically deals with slogans and headlines. So, many of my students complain about this topic because isn´t interesting and they can understand easily since newspapers are read daily and the sports page use a lot of sarcasm and ambiguity. I understood their opinion because personally I agree with them although I never acknowledged it. The point is that I made it interesting for my students. How did I do it? I searched for something I called "minor elements". What in our lives we used those elements of sarcasm and ambiguity? Jokes can be one of them, culturally speaking Brazilian people make many jokes and many of them relies on specific situations under specific context which leads to specific vocabulary, ambiguity and useness.

The teachers´ role during the class preparation is observe what will be taught and to whom. Doing this the teacher can foresee these possible gaps.