While many of us aim to reach learning targets in areas of skills, content, and affect, I have found that sometimes those in the affective domain (what I will call from now on the “big ideas”) are not clear enough to the students.  I believe that this is what often results in questions such as, “why are we learning this?” and complaints of “this doesn’t apply to me!”   I have found these questions to be particularly pervasive in classes of students who find the textual work and content to be…