Questions Reveal Values

I've been thinking a lot about questions this week.  The questions students ask.  The questions I ask.  Questions related to jobs and those we are just curious about.  One of the reasons I have spent so much time thinking about these things is that I've been to two job interviews this week.  They were both jobs with the YMCA, but the positions were different; so the questions I was asked about myself were quite different.  As a department chair, I've also been a part of conducting job interviews.  It occurs to me that the questions we ask reveal something about us as askers.

The questions we ask in job interviews reveal what we value in a colleague and the way they will do their job.  In the interview I had this week for a substitute cycle instructor position, I got a lot of questions about how to anticipate and meet diverse needs or what I would do if something didn't go according to plan (does this sound like teaching or what?).  She asked these questions because when there are 25 people in a cycle class, some of them will be having their first ride and others will be athletes.  Some will have physical considerations, like injury or disability that affect range of motion.  It is likely that technology will fail, and I will need to adapt my instruction to accomplish the same goal in a different way.  Since I am likely to encounter these things, the interviewer wants to know that I won't fall apart when they happen.  The second interview was for a welcome desk position, so the questions were about welcoming people warmly, holding the line on rules, and comfort level with computers.  Since the person at the desk sets the tone for a person's experience, she wants to make sure I'm not going to be a grouch or a person who's afraid of technology.  Her questions reveal that she values people who can enforce rules while being respectful and empathetic to the person in front of her.

When we ask questions in a job interview, we may have an ideal answer in mind, or we may be observing how the prospect reacts to the question.  One of the questions I ask, for example, is "Can you tell us about a time when a lesson went wrong and how you reacted to that?"  While I am interested in the answer, what I really want to find out is whether this person tries new things, takes risks, admits when things don't work, and what they do to clean it up.  Because a person who does that is the kind of person I want in my department.

One thing I have noticed since the pandemic is that students ask fewer questions than they used to.  They have an ever-growing view of their education as a box to check off as they progress toward a college or a career, but they are less curious than they were before.  This makes me sad because I value curiosity so much and know that it can be the most joyful part of school, but it makes me really respond to the questions that are asked.  It now takes more courage to ask a question during a lesson because fewer of their classmates are doing it, so when they do, you know it is something they really care about.  Much like job interview questions, student questions reveal what they value.  If they ask a lot of medical-related questions, it may be because they have a loved one who is ill.  If they ask a lot of questions about how things work, they may be future engineers or tinkerers.  Don't just answer the question and jump back to your planned lesson.  Take a moment to recognize that the student has just told you something about themselves and what they value.  Keep it in mind as you develop relationships with them.

Keep the Questions Coming

I go to church downtown, so I park my car in a deck and then walk a block to the church.  Between the parking deck and the church building is a Marbles Children's Museum, and Sunday is a big day for them.  As a result, I see a lot of families with young children.  

This week, a family was slowly making its way down the stairs because their son (who appeared to be three or four) had short legs, and stairs are made for taller people.  He looked up at his dad and said, "Why are stairs hard?"  In the half block I walked behind them, I saw him point to a tree and say, "What kind of tree is that?"  He put his hand on a public scooter and said, "Is this the motor?"  He looked down at the gutter as he stepped off the cure and said, "Where did all the leaves come from?" and "What's that thing?" (There was a piece of metal in the pile of leaves, and I don't know what it was either.)  He pointed to a parked bike and said, "What kind of bike is that?"  He pointed at a helium tank and said, "How is there a gas station on the sidewalk?"  

This kid is my people.  

He's clearly part of a family that values his questions because his dad answered them all, even explaining the difference between the helium tank and "a gas station."  His older sister wasn't asking a million questions, but she didn't seem to think it was odd.  She just happily skipped in front of them.  Little kids want to understand the world, and they ask a ton of questions because they have no self-consciousness about not knowing.  

Most people as fewer questions as they get older (those of us that don't become science teachers), and there are a few reasons for that.

• We have answers to the most common questions, so we don't have to point to things on the street and ask about them.
• We have some prior knowledge about more things, so we can do a lot of asking and speculating inside our own minds, leading to asking fewer questions out loud.
• We stop caring about things that don't impact our wallets.  This one makes me the saddest, and you know it has happened when students start asking about when they will use something in real life.  We didn't care about that when we were young, and it only changed because an adult told us it should.
• We start to feel insecure about what we don't know.  This four-year-old didn't think he should already know the answers to the questions he was asking, so he had no fear in asking them.  As we get older, we're afraid we'll look dumb if we ask a question because we assume our peers already know the answer.
• We stop thinking of pure curiosity as a virtue.

Teachers, we can't control all of these factors, but we do have some level of control over our classroom environment.  

• The first and most important thing we can do is model our own curiosity.  When you wonder about something, wonder aloud.  Ask your students; they will love it if they know the answer to something you don't.  When they see adults being curious about something just out of interest, not because it makes them better at their job or makes them more money, it can keep them engaged in asking questions.  
• Help them to recognize that there are deeper questions to be asked about everything.  Just because a student has the answer to a surface-level question doesn't mean there is nothing more to be asked.  When I ask a question, so students like to give them the most basic and accessible answer possible.  My most frequent follow-up is, "So then how does that happen?"  They need to know that saying "A plant makes energy through photosynthesis" isn't the end of the story.  There are between 3 and 300 more questions to be explored beyond that level.
• Make it okay to "ask a stupid question."  Please don't tell them there is no such thing as a stupid question; it's just untrue.  However, there is nothing wrong with asking about something you do not know.  When other students react badly, point out that we all have things we don't know and that the only way to find out is to ask.  (Again, if you have modeled this in your own life, the atmosphere of your classroom will be different.  My middle school history teacher, Mr. Watkins, used to talk about things from the Mini-Page, a weekly insert in our local newspaper aimed at children.  When someone in our class asked why he would read the Mini-Page, he said, "because there are things in it that I didn't know before.")
• Explicitly state that curiosity matters.  I've always been curious, but perhaps the most important thing my 9th-grade science teacher, Mr. Sandberg ever said to me was, "This curiosity you have is an important part of you."  He made it clear that it wasn't just a good thing or a fun thing, but it was an important thing.  The fact that he said to me in the 9th grade mattered a lot because that is the time when the utilitarian shift tends to happen.

Ask questions.  Answer questions.  Respect questions.  Love questions.  Do whatever you can to keep the questions coming.

Stupid Questions - Yes, There Are

Kids who are not super confident often preface their questions during class with "This might be a stupid question, but. . ."  Many well-meaning teachers respond to that with the line, "There are no stupid questions."  I know that sounds good at the moment, but the problem is that it is simply not true. 

Consider this scene from The Office.  Dwight has gone home to bury his aunt.  While there, he spends some time with his nephew, Cameron, who is being raised in the city and knows nothing of farm life.  He points at a goat and asks if it is a cow. 
Cameron: [after following Dwight to the chicken coop, before sunrise] Is it dangerous to take the eggs in front of them?
Dwight: Yes, very. You really need to stand back because these are killer chickens.
Cameron: I was just asking you something I didn't know.
Dwight: Which is fine. And, you learned something. But, it was kind of a stupid question so you're gonna get made fun of a little bit.

There are absolutely stupid questions.  I've been asked hundreds of them.  When you give instructions and a kid asks what to do, that's a stupid question.  You know it is because other kids look at them with the "Dude, she JUST said that" look.  When a student comes in after an absence and asks if you did anything yesterday, that's a stupid question.  In Dwight fashion, I usually respond with, "No, we put on black armbands and mourned your absence" before giving them a real answer.  (If you are a student reading this, it would make a world of difference if you change it to "What did I miss yesterday?")  My freshman year in college, I was standing in one of a thousand registration lines.  This one was for student IDs, and there was a large sign (like 3 feet tall) that said, "This is not the line for parking passes."  Yet, as I waited in that line, I heard the person at the table say to the 12 people in front of me, "No, this is not the line for parking passes."  These are people enrolling in college, and rather than read the sign, they waited in line and then asked that rather stupid question.  Most of them walked away in a huff as though it was the school's fault they had wasted their time in line.

Don't misunderstand.  I love questions.  The best part of my day is when a student asks a question to which I do not know the answer.  Then, we get to find out together.  I get asked deep and wonderful questions on a daily basis.  Even after 20 years of teaching, I still get asked questions I've never been asked before, and I love that.  I never want to discourage curiosity.  I just don't believe lying to students is the way to encourage them.

The strangest question I've ever been asked happened in my first year.  For context, we were in the middle of a unit about the Apollo program.  We had been talking about men walking on the moon for over a week.  At the time the question was asked, we were watching a video in which Dave Scott was driving the lunar rover, and ten minutes earlier, there had been a scene in which they considered their landing site options because there was concern about the 18000ft mountain range in the area.  Okay, you got all that?  Are you ready?  Nicole raised her hand and said, "Miss Hawks, how big is the moon?"  That is not a stupid question, and I don't know the answer right off the top of my head, but I do know how to calculate it, so I started doing that.  Then she said, "I mean, like, if you brought it down here, would it be as big as me?"  I can only imagine my facial expression as my finger hovered over the calculator buttons for a moment.  When I told her that it was, in fact, about 2000 miles bigger than her, she asked, "How come it look so small, then?"  This fifteen-year-old had no understanding of the fact that when things are far away, they look smaller.  Later on, I found out that she thought having "stars in your eyes" was literal.  She believed stars could fit in your eyes.

By the way, Nicole did not preface that with "this might be a stupid question."  When a kid says that, it almost never is.  It's just a kid who lacks confidence and is perhaps a bit tangential.  Instead of responding with the falsehood that there are no stupid questions, I say, "We won't know until you ask.  Let's find out."  Kids will eventually find out that there are stupid questions (perhaps when they have kids), so it isn't a good life-lesson to teach them that there aren't.  The better life-lesson, in my opinion, is "Don't be afraid to ask a stupid question."

Ask The Bigger Question

You may have noticed that life seems to be moving faster than it used to.  It's not really.  After all, we have the same 24 hours in every day that people always have.  It seems like it is moving faster because we are trying to fit more into those 24 hours and fueling them with caffeine.  Instead of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, at 6 pm, we get news all day from multiple sources without regard to their credibility.  We want to get so much done that we are actually pursuing whether or not humans can live without sleep.

The relentless speed of input and activity means we rarely slow down long enough to reflect and ask the bigger questions, like how certain events fit into a larger context.  Our brains are processing so much data that we have no time to go through the steps of learning (via Architecture of Learning by Kevin Washburn).  We are constantly at the Experience level, but as our brains strive to reach Comprehension, a new piece of news comes our way.  It is hard for our brains to get to Elaboration and Application.  For that reason, we aren't fully integrating these experiences.  This cannot be good for the human brain, but we aren't even slowing down long enough to ask that question.

As a result of this constant bombardment without intellectual integration, we revert to our most basic of emotions, self-defense.  As an example, an announcement comes over the intercom at school, asking for men to come and help move some chairs.  The women in the building immediately react that this was sexist, even though, given a few moments of thought, we know that the people we work for don't view women as weak or less than men.  Because we don't take the time to reflect, we react out of surface level emotions.  We don't act; we react.  Because we live in 2017, we take our reaction to social media.  Because we live in a community, our reaction cause other people react as well; and we are soon in a Twitter war.  Other people jump on our side or the other side, and it gets out of hand quickly.  We say things we wouldn't if we just slowed down long enough to ask the bigger questions.

YIKES!  This can't be the way God meant for us to live our lives.

The good news is that we can make it better.  It won't be hard, but we will have to do it on purpose.  We have to slow down for a few seconds and ask ourselves a few questions.  This will keep us from reacting emotionally and, in some cases, keep us from reacting at all.

1.  What do I actually know about the situation?
Because of instant video footage, we think we know events.  The truth is, we may only know the 30 seconds shown in the video, which the person took after the inciting incident began.  We may not know what started the problem, but we are quick to judge that 30 seconds as though we were there.  Stop for another 30 seconds and ask yourself what you actually know before you respond.

2.  Do I know the character of the people involved?
My reaction to strangers should be different than my reaction to people I know well.  If I know that a person is not a sexist or a racist, I don't need to react to their tweet as though sexism or racism is clearly implied.  Take 30 seconds to say to yourself (out loud if you need to), "I know they didn't mean to come off that way."  Then, if you are still bothered, take a few minutes to go talk to them instead of about them.

3.  How will my reaction represent me?
This is big.  When we react out of self-defense or anger, we know everything that led up to that emotional moment.  Your Facebook friends do not.  They are not inside your mind, and to them, you may just look like an over-reacting, crazy person.  I assume you would not want to be viewed that way (unless it is the truth about you).  One over-reacting tweet may not ruin your reputation, but a series of them will.  Take 30 seconds to ask yourself, "Do I want this to be what people think of me?"

4.  Does my reaction fit with my worldview?
I am a Christian school teacher, so I spend a lot of my day thinking about worldview.  As we take in new information, it is filtered through our worldview.   That is why two people looking at the same data can interpret it as pro-creationism or pro-evolution.  Both people are reading the same thing different ways.  We think less about this, but our reactions should also be filtered through our worldview.  If I believe in the Biblical Jesus, my reaction should be Biblical.  That doesn't mean it will never be angry (Jesus did drive the money changers out of the Temple with a handmade whip), but I imagine it would be angry less often if I filtered it through a Christlike worldview.  I imagine the source of the anger would be less about me than most reactions we put online.  It's probably going to take more than 30 seconds to process this one, but it is worth the time.

We are all participating in a large scale, high stakes, sociological experiment.  That would be okay if it weren't rewiring our brains and making us reactive creatures.  You can step aside and change the parameters of the experiment.  Put the phone down for a minute.  React later.  There's no value in reacting first; there is only value in acting well.

Judge For Yourself

There are two professions in which fads are most prevalent, fashion and education.  It is obvious in fashion as there are visible and recognizable from season to season.  It is even necessary to the survival of the industry.  

In education, the fads are a bit more subtle as they take longer to implement and stick around for several years.  They are not, however, necessary to the survival of education and may even be harmful to the students on which they are tried.  Not all fads are bad, of course, but it is important to recognize one when you see it and then (and this is important, people) use your professional judgment.  

When I began teaching eighteen years ago, I wondered why my freshmen couldn't spell the simplest words.  For two years, I taught fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who could not spell words like definite or intelligent.  When I asked them what the problem was, they informed me that they had been instructed using the inventive spelling method.    For those blessedly unfamiliar with this "pedagogy," inventive spelling is "the practice of spelling unfamiliar words by making an educated guess as to the correct spelling based on the writer's existing phonetic knowledge." (grammar.yourdictionary.com) The hope is that the student will eventually learn to spell the words correctly by absorption.  It doesn't work, and I can't imagine why anyone thought it would, but my students were subjected to it for three years of elementary school.  These students are now in their early thirties and, based on their facebook pages, they still struggle to spell words correctly.  

My first two semesters of college, I took Calculus I and II - sort of.  I was part of an experimental curriculum, called Discovering Calculus.  The book, which was an anorexic 90 pages long, did not have formulas in it.  We, as college students, were supposed to figure out the formulas by intuition.  The logic behind this approach came from years of students knowing how to perform calculus equations without really understanding them.  While I understand that issue, I do know that students who passed those class could do the calculus they learned while I still cannot.  There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton for mankind to have calculus.  Every student in my class went to a used bookstore and bought a real calculus book so that we could survive this class.  

Now that I have taught for nearly two decades, I am left to ask myself where the professional judgment was in these teachers.  Was there really an elementary school teacher who truly thought second graders would eventually figure out the spelling of words when the English language is fraught with exceptions to phonics?  My calculus professors were not first-year teachers.  They knew how to teach calculus to physics and engineering majors because they had done it for many years (one of them for decades).  What made them think this would work?  My guess is that in both cases, the people in the classroom didn't have a choice.  They probably had it handed down to them by their administration because someone convinced those people to adopt the latest educational fad.  

Those schools no longer teach inventive spelling or discovering calculus because it proved to be ineffective.  If this were the fashion industry, that might not be a big deal.  We all get to look back at our bow blouses and banana clips with nothing more than a blushing head shake.  This is not true, however, in education.  These fads are experiments, and the guinea pigs are our students.  It is dangerous to try every fad in education without serious thought.

Lest you think that I want our classrooms to stay stuck in the model of two hundred years ago, let me quickly dispel that notion.  I teach enthusiastically in a one-to-one school, and my students learn through the use of internet research, show their learning through video construction, and reflect on their learning through blogging.  They collaborate on projects and review using every online tool I can find.  I have digital textbooks, have flipped lessons, and use youtube so much that I don't know how I taught without it.  There is nothing about me that resists the use of technology.  HOWEVER, (and it is a big however), if a teacher is using technology for the sake of using technology, they are using technology wrong.  

You owe it to your students to analyze your own pedagogy.  The educational value of teachers lies in our judgment as trained professionals.  Anyone can deliver information, but it takes an educator to decide on what to teach (and what not to teach) as well as the best way to teach, reinforce, and assess learning.  When a new fad comes along in education, it may actually be a great new way to teach something, but keep in mind that it may not be.  Ask yourself the following questions:

- Does the new way offer brain engagement in a way that the old way does not?
- Does the new way take away from brain development that the old way offers?
- Is there value to the new tool for more than one curriculum point?
- If the new way doesn't work, what long-term effect will it have on students?
- Does the new way teach a skill or thinking process that students will need in the future?

Sometimes, the new way is the best way, and sometimes it is not.  My students blog because I decided that they would benefit from weekly reflection, that I could expose them to content there wasn't time for in class, and that I could ask them to empathize by using appropriate prompts.  My professional judgment was that these were important enough goals to make grading seventy blogs a week worth it.  My students make videos because script-writing forces them to put learning in their own words, but they do not make stop-action videos (unless they choose it) because I find little educational value to justify the time it takes.  My students have collaborative projects because it is my professional judgment that much non-academic learning happens when people work together.  My students also have solo projects because I believe that there must be times when students create on their own.  The common element in each of these situations is that I do not just passively adopt the newest fad method or technological tool.  I don't just ride the educational pendulum.  Rather, I employ all my training and experience to make the right decision for my classroom.  

Just as importantly, I am fortunate enough to have an administration that allows me to do so.  

Just a Story? There's No Such Thing

This weekend, the movie The Shack, based on the book of the same name was released and opened third at the box office.  I believe this book to be heretical and don't expect any more from the movie and have shared a few posts on my social media regarding it.  There are enough of those, so that's not what this post is about.  This post addresses the most common response I have received with regard to these posts.

"It's just a story."
"Come on, it's just a story.  It's not scripture."
"It's just a story.  Lighten up."
"It's not supposed to be the Bible.  It's just a story."

Here's the thing; I'm not sure there is any such thing a just a story.

Stories have a powerful effect on us.  It's why people write them.  Before there was even writing, there was storytelling.  It's why we teach literature to students and read books to children.  It's why there are book quotes in my twitter feed.  It's why I was upset when Atticus Finch let me down in the sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's why a teenager quotes Harry Potter to me almost daily.  It's why I think about The West Wing when I consider what might be happening inside the white house.  The stories we read become part of our collective consciousness.  They become part of us and our shared beliefs.  They affect our thinking in ways we aren't even conscious of.

I'm not a fan of censorship, so I'm not advocating boycotts or book burnings.  I am, however, a big fan of self-censorship.  I believe we must take care in our own lives about the stories we choose.  This is especially true when a story is about God.  I don't know much about William Young; he may be a perfectly lovely man.  The only thing I know about him for sure is that he is fallen and has, therefore, a fallen imagination.  Do I want his imagination to become part of my theology?  Do I want a woman named Papa to bleed into my thoughts about the Creator?  Even if the effect on my thinking remains small, we aren't talking about a small effect on my thoughts about dogs or space aliens.  We are talking about the way I think about God.  THIS. IS. IMPORTANT.  This isn't something for me to lighten up about.

We live in a world of books, movies, music, and art of various kinds.  There is no way to consume it all, so we make choices.  It is our responsibility as teachers to help our students make wise choices, and we cannot do that if we are modeling passive consumption.  We must use wisdom for ourselves as well.  I'm not suggesting that we insulate ourselves into a bubble that only include art that agrees with our worldview.  The world is a more complex and interesting place than that.  I am suggesting that we don't judge a work of art casually because it is JUST a work of art.  Francis Schaeffer's great work Art and the Bible gives four criteria for judging a work of art faithfully.  Only one of those four is the worldview of the artist and the message the work communicates, but it is one of the four.  Those responding, "It's just a story" are leaving it off the list entirely.

Outsourcing Your Thinking

Whoever came up with the idea that there is no such thing as a stupid question never taught middle school.

Before you decide I am a horrible person for squelching a child's curiosity, those aren't the kinds of questions I'm talking about.  Asking how many times Texas would fit on the moon is not a stupid question (57 times if you are interested) because it is an attempt to relate something you do know to something you do not.  These questions, while sometimes odd, are not stupid.

I'm talking about questions like:
- Can we use a pen on this?
- When I get to number 50, do I go on to number 51?
- Does this problem take place on earth?
- Does it matter what order these are in?
- The calendar says this is due tomorrow.  Is it?
- Can I have a book on my desk to read when the test is finished?
- When you say, "will dissolve," do you mean after you stir it?
- Does my name need to be on this?
- And of course thousands of questions that you just answered when you were giving the instructions.

The reason that these are stupid questions is that the student could have answered it without asking if they had taken about three seconds to think.
- They have taken dozens of scantron tests in their lives.  They know the scantron requires pencil.  Three seconds of thinking avoids this question.
- Where else would I go after number 50?  I really wanted to ask what numbering system was used
  on his home planet.  Three seconds of thinking avoids this question.
- If this problem didn't take place on earth, wouldn't I have told you?  I don't expect them to just
   figure out it was Jupiter.  They had to think for way longer than three seconds to come up with the
   question when three seconds of logic would have kept them from asking it.
- If the order mattered, I would have told them in class, during a review, and in the instructions.
   Three seconds of thinking could have avoided this question.
- I get a lot of e-mail questions about when things are due.  We have an online academic calendar for
   every class, so that should be the answer to due date questions.  Three seconds of thinking would
   tell you that the question has already been answered.
- The book question would be perfectly polite and good if this had not been written on the board:  
  "On your desk, have out pencils and calculator as well as any reading material or studying material
   you plan to use after the test."  Three seconds of looking at the board will answer this question.
- Kids read into test questions so much, I have come up with the line, "Stop writing your own
  questions."  This is just one example.  I get so many, "what did you mean by . . ." questions that I
  have them read the question to me and say, "I mean that."
- If your name isn't on it, how will I know who to give your grade to?  Three seconds of thinking
  would avoid this question as well.

You may get the impression from this that I am super sarcastic, but let me assure you that if you had to field these questions from 120 students a day, you would lean toward sarcastic as well.  Students want to outsource their thinking.  Sometimes, they outsource it to me.  Sometimes, they outsource it to their parents or their e-mail.  My job is more than teaching them facts.  It also involves teaching them to think.  So, if I give what seems like a curt answer, it is only because I want them to experience a little negative consequence for not thinking for themselves while they are in middle school.  The consequences they will experience for it in college or a career will be far worse than my facial expressions or silly replies.  I don't want a world in which adults have never been required to pause for three seconds to think for themselves.