Let Them Be Curious and Make Them Curious

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a conference of Christian School teachers in my area, called ACSI Nexus.  This is not a normal convention because for the most part, we all listen to the same speakers.  There is a live site (in Maryland I think) that beams out the signal to satellite sites all over the world.  This year, we had an excellent collection of speakers (see my notes in a previous post).  The one I most looked forward to was by Dr. Kevin Washburn.  I looked forward to it partially because I have seen other presentations and enjoy his style and partially because his topic was the role of curiosity in the learning process.

We all know (I hope) that a student will be more likely to learn something they are curious about.  Some have taken that to mean that we should not have curricula.  We should just allow students to explore whatever interests them, and then they will get the things they need for the career they will ultimately have.  Aside from that being a little hippy dippy for 2015, let's analyze the problem with that.  A student doesn't always know what they will like until they have been exposed to it by a passionate advocate of that thing.  My second favorite vegetable on earth is a zucchini (the first is green peas in case you are interested), but I would have never have eaten the first bite of zucchini if it had not been for my friend Kay's mom.  When you ate dinner at Kay's house, her mom pulled a number out of thin air and required you to eat at least that number of everything before you could say you didn't want any more.  I'll never forget this day.  She was steaming zucchini, and that looked weird to me.  She said, "You don't have to like it, but you have to eat three slices."  Those three slices have turned into three hundred thousand slices over the course of my life.  You don't like the food example, here's one that is more on point.  The great love of my academic life is physics.  When I tell people what I do, I do not get positive responses from most people; but I adore it.  Before I took it in high school, I didn't know that I liked it.  My chemistry teacher insisted that I take honors physics, so I did.  On day four, I had already decided that teaching physics would be the thing I did for a living.

Why, because the man in this picture was amazing at showing me how much he loved it; and it made me love it too.  This photo (which I took, developed, printed, matted, and framed myself) hangs behind my desk on the wall of my classroom.  I am still inspired by his love of physics as well as his love for teaching.  This is Jim Barbara, who was THE best physics teacher I could have had.  One thing I remember the most is that he liked it when I asked him questions.  I had poor Mr. Barbara the last period of the day.  Not having another class to run off to, I would stay after class and ask him everything from why electricity hurt when it shocked you to how a key  opened a lock.  I'm sure Mr. Barbara had other things to get done, be he patiently and enthusiastically answered every question.

So, if we aren't going to take the hippy approach to curiosity, there's always the other end up the pendulum's arc.  I'm the teacher; I know what you need to know; you don't; listen to what I am telling you; don't worry about learning anything else; don't worry if you haven't been excited to learn anything I have taught you all year long; just learn it.  If you are this kind of teacher, please leave the profession.  Don't wait until the end of the year.  Go to your principal and resign as soon as you finish this post.  There is not room for you in 2015 teaching.  We all know that we can't make everything a student learns thrilling just as we can't deep fry zucchini in chocolate sauce (well, there is the fair, so maybe we can do that).  But if you haven't made your students curious about anything, you have a problem.  If they have had no enthusiasm for learning anything all year, it isn't them.

So, what is the middle ground between the hippy and the autocrat?  It is two fold.  First, you can make your students curious about whatever you are teaching them.  You may have to get creative, but you work in a creative field.  Google "demonstrations for _____" whatever the thing is you are teaching tomorrow.  When I teach Bernoulli's principle, I start class by asking someone to blow under a sheet of paper I have sitting on two books.  I offer them a dollar if they can blow it up and off the paper.  When it does the opposite of what they think it is going to, I can talk for twenty minutes, explaining the principle and how it relates to flight and why the windows blow out of your house in a tornado and how a curve ball works.  I could do the demonstration after we have learned it, but doing it before makes them want to understand it.  It doesn't take a different amount of time, and it is way more fun.

The second is to follow some rabbit trails.  As you can tell from the title of my blog, I believe strongly in the rabbit trail.  I have always believed that this is where most of the learning happens.  I have also been teaching long enough to know that you can't just follow EVERY trail wherever it leads.  You have the pressures of curriculum, AP requirements, and common core.  Some of you may even have administrations who expect you to cover the entire book.  This doesn't mean you can't allow for some of them.  There are a lot of ways to do this.  Have a five minute time period after they start asking questions where you keep calling on kids before you have to say, "Now, back to what we were doing because we do have to finish."  Invite your kids to e-mail questions to you, and then use a half day (when it is hard to accomplish a whole lesson anyway) to answer them.  I knew an elementary teacher who had a stack of post its on every student's desk so they could write questions as they thought of them and then ask them when she had open question time.  If you teach the same subject long enough, you will know where it is important to work in time because the same questions arise every year at that time.  When I teach sound waves, I spend one day on the human ear because it helps to connect all the stuff we learn about frequency and amplitude and timbre if they understand the ear process the wave.  After a few years, I realized that I was answering questions every year about ears popping on a plane, tubes, and hearing under water.  I had planned my lesson bell to bell and quickly answer those and then talk really fast about everything else.  Now, I know those rabbit trails are coming, and I leave time in my lesson for them to ask.  If they don't ask, I throw the rabbit in myself.  I say something like, "Sometimes, people ask about why your ears pop on an airplane.  Do you ever wonder about that?"  That's usually enough to get them going the direction I want, thinking they saw the rabbit themselves.  For those worried curriculum coverage, how is the discussion of pressure on the eardrum not a reinforcement of what we already learned about pressure in the curriculum?  The discussion on hearing under water is introducing the concept of refraction, which they will be learning later in the same chapter.  They'll be so much more interested in learning that when I say, "Remember the answer to Brad's question a few weeks ago about hearing under water?  Guess what?  Light does that too."

There are all kinds of ways to take advantage of student curiosity, whether they have it when they walk through the door or you throw a rabbit at them to take them down the trail you want.  They will  like your class more and (more importantly) learn the material more deeply and fully.  That's what we all want, no matter what the other pressures are.