What is your favorite content area to teach?

There were so many possible responses in this poll that no one response received an overwhelming majority of votes. Language Arts and Mathematics received more votes than any other categories, with Social Studies and Health and Sciences coming in third and fourth. The remaining categories of Arts and Humanities, World Languages, Vocational Education, Computing, Music and Physical Education all received less than 8% of the votes each and a total of a little over 20% combined.

Language Arts and Mathematics are two basic core subjects and take up a lot of classroom teaching time so it is fortunate that more teachers like these subjects than any others. It could be argued that these two subjects also have the biggest impact on other subject lessons. It's hard to read your Science textbook or write research essays for Humanities without basic language art skills.

The two categories which scored lowest on this poll were physical education and music. While they may be important to body and soul they don't have much academic benefit. That is not to say they are unimportant, it is just that they don't impact other subjects in any academic way. Being physically active does have an effect on brain function and research has shown that daily physical activity helps students perform better overall. But while student brain function might be improved, without writing skills their academic performance will still be lacking.

It is surprising that more teachers didn't select Computing as their favourite subject to teach. Most of us like to play around with new technology and you would think that more teachers would want to spend their days in the computer lab teaching students how to play around with it too. Perhaps it is a subject area too prone to distraction to attract many teaching fans. Students are always playing games when the teacher isn't looking.

Looking at the results of this poll, it would seem that core subject areas are most teachers' favourite content areas. That's probably for the best, because unless all students plan on becoming world class pianists, it's more important that they learn to read and write, and add and subtract. It will probably serve them better in the future.