The pain of not knowing the answer

The factory isn’t optimized for thinking. (Image by MichaelGaida)

My goal, in most assignments, is to get my students to think.

This runs counter to the goal that most of them have, which is to complete their work as quickly and easily as possible, without thinking.

It can’t blame them for this habit. Many of the assignments they’ve had over their school years don’t require any thinking. You do the work to prove that you were in class, paying attention, and that’s it.

If you have to think, it means you didn’t get it. And not getting something right away, in many classrooms, is a marker of being stupid. So students don’t ask questions and they don’t think. No one wants to be stupid.

The result is that many of the kids never really understand what they’re doing and work to conceal this. And after years of bluffing, they lack the necessary foundation to understand grade level concepts. They have no choice but to keep going through the motions without comprehension. To be faced with a question they don’t know the answer to — and therefore have to think about — means that they might be exposed. They guess wildly or talk about things they know in order to avoid the pain of not knowing the answer.

Meanwhile, kids who tend to grasp new concepts immediately are constantly tasked with practicing something they already know. Therefore, without any practice in dealing with challenging problems, they crumble when faced with a question they don’t know the answer to. They also guess wildly or talk about things they know in order to avoid the pain of not knowing the answer.

Ironically, everyone’s so afraid of looking stupid that they do things that reinforce ignorance. They don’t ask questions. They don’t take their time. They don’t read directions. They don’t study the paragraph to see if it makes more sense on the second or third reading. They don’t think. So they don’t learn and they don’t grow.

These students don’t understand that they could become smarter by doing the things they are afraid to do. They could ask for help and clarification. They could go back to foundational material to practice it. They could study for the test. They could slow down and think.

They have the whole thing backward. If they don’t instantly know the answer, they tune out. Whereas the whole point of the question is to provide an opportunity for thinking. To take what you know and use it to make new connections and solve new problems, something we have to do every day in real life.

It’s hard to see so many bright students eschewing opportunities to learn, even related to topics they are passionate about. School made them this way. My little eighteen-month-old nephew passionately points to everything he can see, asking, with his eyes, for its name. “Sunglasses. Cup. Laptop charger.” Like all toddlers, he wants more information, more ideas, more challenge. He never stops asking questions. He doesn’t pretend to already know the answer or decide he’s comfortable with his ignorance. He’s aggressively seeking new information and working to reconcile it with what he already knows. He’s thinking. That’s how we all used to be, until we went to school.

How can I run a school without contributing to this problem of “school ruins kids”? I want to reward good thinking and visible effort even when it hasn’t led to the right answer yet. I want to encourage moments of reflection. I want to reward slowness and mindfulness. I want to praise those who ask questions and admit when they don’t know something. And yet, in what ways am I continuing to influence students to believe that they need the right answer — or that they need to do things in what I believe is the “right way” in order to please me?

I don’t know. I don’t have any easy and obvious solutions right now. It’s taken some time for me to get to the point where I can see the problem so clearly. Just as with the students themselves, a pat answer off the top of my head is counterproductive. I need to spend more time thinking about the problem before I will have any chance of solving it. That is my commitment — one that I’m several years into and may work at for at least a decade more. At the very least, I’m teaching by example.