Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?

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A teacher once told me that for a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food for runaway slaves. He asked what I thought about the assignment. I pointed out that his students probably thought for forty seconds about the relation ship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad, and for forty minutes about measuring flour, mix shortening, and so on. Whatever students think about is what they will remember.

My husband told me the same thing: If you decide to give a game of studying for students to play in the lesson, make sure they don't pay most of their attention on game itself instead of the meaning of the game which you really want them to learn and remember. He gave me a very famous bad example. There was a class where the teacher asked students to teach each other by making a PowerPoint as their tool. As a result most students spent most of their time on how they could make a fancy PowerPoint to attract other's attention. The content of the PowerPoint was mostly neglected.