The other night Jay, my son, SO, my wife, and I were sitting in the kitchen talking and SO was looking through her Pokemon Go app, when she asked a question about what she needed to evolve a certain Pokemon. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t worry it’s not that important for this story. The thing is, Jay started going off about what was needed in detail, talking about what she needed and what the evolutions were and a whole bunch of other facts that, to be frankly honest, confused both SO and I. He actually went on for about ten minutes, even though the answer to her question was just a single item.
On the other hand, the following night he was studying for a Chinese spelling test this week. And let me tell you, getting him to go through the list of words was a chore. He fought every step of the way and really didn’t want to do it at all. He finally got through them all without an argument, but it was close going.
So, what’s the difference? In hindsight it’s quite obvious. With his Chinese spelling, all he’s doing is memorising a bunch of words and how to use them. With Pokemon, he’s having fun and this creates a lot of curiosity for him, so he spends countless hours researching and memorising every detail he can find out about them.
And this, I believe is the difference. With his schoolwork, the teachers are focusing on getting the students to memorise rather than learn. For a lot of people there’s no difference between memorising facts and learning, but for true learning we must, at an early stage, learn to ask questions. Because without asking these question we don’t gain a proper understanding of the subject. What we become is a human computer, programmed to recite facts without having an underlying understanding of the information.
So, what do we do? We can’t change our school systems, at least not easily. What we need to do is spend a little time to encourage our kids to think creatively about things. When they’re doing chores around the house, ask them to think of different ways to do it. For example, if we’re cleaning a room, I could say how I’d do it, where I’d start and how I go about it. Then I could ask Jay for his ideas, can he see a different way to go about it. It doesn’t have to be better, just different, to get him to think about it creatively.
And what about his schoolwork? We can ask the question that drives parents crazy, why? How many of us have gotten so sick of that question that we’ve beaten it out of our children, figuratively speaking at least. When we ask the why question, we’re changing our way of thinking about things, going from a mere memorisation to a more deeper understanding of why something is the way it is, or how something works.
At first it requires us to ask the question, but over time our kids will start to ask it of themselves. And eventually it will move into the classroom where our kids will be asking the teacher the why questions. Hopefully they have a teacher who will answer them and to brush them off. Not that we can always blame them, Jay is in a class of over 30 students, so I can understand that they don’t want to continually answer those questions when they have to go through the set curriculum. But I do hope they will try their best to answer and encourage critical thinking. It’s important for our kids to develop these skills, otherwise future generations will be no better than walking computers, programmed to recite and not to think.
If anyone has tried this, I’d love to hear from you, whether it was successful or not, and maybe we can improve our kids lives together. Please comment below.