Curiouser and Curiouser - Alice

Curiouser and Curiouser!  Alice cried out towards her feet that were further and further.  “How cute!” That is my first thought.  “How to keep kids curious and how to make their curiosity burn higher?” My second thought jumped to me right after that.

Curiosity, the greatest power that leads human from cave to house, from tribe to country, from village to around the world and now to the Mars, which is also so fragile that many adults forget all about it, and even hurting kids’ curiosity witfully or not.

Now we all know that stopping kids’ questions are damaging kids’ curiosity.  We also know that giving kids firm answers without providing kids opportunities to explore, make mistakes, and discover new things are damaging kids’ curiosity.  Than what can we do to keep kids curiosity burning?   Are there different curiosity?  How can we, as parents and teachers, getting these curiosity stronger and deeper?

Questions and questions!

Yes, questions are the carrier of curiosity.  If we kill questions, we kill curiosity.  First, we tell kids their questions are great, even if we cannot answer them.  If we have to shift to other urgent things first, let’s write down the questions and always come back to it later.  This way, kids know we love his questions and when he grow up, he will love his own questions and his curiosity will not die out.

But, do we answer all kids’ questions?  What if we have hard time to answer them for the questions are beyond our capability or not what we want to answer?  Well, even if we can answer their questions easily, do not always provide answers back for this is the great chance for them to know more just your simple answer.  For some questions, we can ask questions back to guide them think further.  For some questions, we can find a book or a video to read together and dig out lot more information around the questions.  We can work with our kids to do an experiment and discover the answers together or simply ask them to try it out!  Or, there would be time, it is ok we tell them to wait.  If we respect kids enough and do not do this push-off too often, this will not hurt their curiosity.

When kids grow older, unfortunately, they will be busy with homeworks, how sad!  But we can always write down all the questions and when we can find a time, maybe one hour a week or even one hour a month, we can open up the question log with kids and work on the one he pick.  He will remember forever the happiness to explore with adults’ love and support.

Grab the idea spark!

Once in a middle school math class, the teacher were introducing pendulum to kids.  They talked about how the string length impacts the cycle time of the pendulum.  One kid named Rachel murmured to her friend:”I wish our class time is as short as the pendulum cycle!”  Too bad, the teacher heard it and out of my surprise, he jumped back to his black board, wrote down a huge question and said:”Please blame Rachel and let’s find out the answer, if we need a pendulum that has the cycle time as our class duration, what is the length of the pendulum?” Down the question, he also wrote hugely: “Rachel’s law”.  Later I heard that the teacher also used the name of “Rachel’s law” when he introduce this question to other classes.

I believe all the kids will remember this class for 10 years or even their whole life.  What if more sparks like this are shining in our class?

I do not know how to enlighten these sparks just yet but I’m sure if we shut kids up and just shower them with answers, there would not be any sparks come out.

Hackathon!

Every of us have time pressure.  We rush to finish a book and we rush to fulfill the curriculum.  I’m not ready to throw out the whole curriculum structure but I can throw them alway for one week a year for sure.

Now in silicon valley high tech companies, one week hackathon has been done many times and in many companies and it has been proved to be effectively inspiring inventions again and again.  In this week, all the engineers leave out their daily work and get together.  Some engineers put out ideas about what they want to do in this week and others can pick the ideas they like and join the team to work together.  This is the time people try all kinds of new ideas, some work and most do not.  However, these ideas can spark lot more ideas ahead and keep everybody feel the fun and excitement at work.

If I have a hackathon week at my classroom, I will definitely have my students organize it.  They can organize different science classes or talent shows.  The key would be they can teach each other something new.  Once a student know how teaching works, no matter it is singing a song or simple as rock scissor paper, their learning can be fundamentally changed.  Once a teacher is reminded how to learn from kids position, his teaching will be different, too.

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There are way too many studies and researches need to be done around curiosities.  This should be the core of pedagogy research for if education hurts curiosity, it is nothing better than the poisonous rice.

The possible math or physics questions

1.  How big is the pool of tear?

2.  Can you build the map about the tunnel and the rooms the story mentioned?  Can you try your best to label the size, citing the evidence from the story?

3.  Drying yourself competition.

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