Curiosity – Interview With a New Teacher

One of the pleasures of working with children is that I often get into conversations with teachers. Chris Byner recently asked me some questions about curiosity. I applaud his notion of creating a “dangerous” classroom.

Gever,
A while back I sent you a tweet asking about interviewing you about curiosity. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. As a new teacher, I hope to make my classroom a “dangerous” place for kids.

What is the nature of curiosity? Is it innate, learned, or both?
There are some really interesting developments in neuroscience that imply that we are actually wired to be inquisitive. In particular, the lateral habenula and basal forebrain seem to function together to reward us for learning something new. Like most of the brain, this reward mechanism appears to work on a “use it or lose it” basis and a few years of disuse can lead to atrophy of curiosity – or, as it’s commonly known, apathy.

So, I would say that although it is innate it must be practiced – but surprisingly, the mechanism does not seem to fall prey to overstimulation. We don’t require ever greater discoveries. It seems that the more we learn, the more we take pleasure in learning. I am as thrilled to discover a new property of string as I am to explore a whole new domain of science.

What motivates children to learn, explore, and wonder?
Curiosity is more than a simple chemical response in the brain. Curiosity has aspects of play that are also key to understanding it as both a phenomenon and a characteristic of people. If we are curious about something it is often in part because we are having fun. Curiosity is itself a playful endeavor – we are exploring unknown territory purely for the sake of understanding, the pleasure of knowing, and the thrill of discovery. When we are curious, the world is more of a puzzle than a problem. Problems are difficult, puzzles are fun.

What does formal education do well regarding the development of a child’s curiosity? What does it do poorly?
I am hard-pressed to think of positive aspects of traditional formal education in regards the fostering of curiosity. That being said, a working formal education system should, in theory, spark the imagination and feed curiosity by exposing children to a wider range of topics and ideas than they might encounter on their own.

But curiosity takes time and trust – we must give children time to follow their curiosity, and trust that the time will be well spent – commodities in short supply in the typical schoolroom. Being curious is a deeply personal experience and necessarily self-centered to a certain degree. As a result, the curious child will be a problem child if they are too stubbornly curious in the context of a formal education.

Consider the process of learning to be a story with an unknown ending. Your curiosity leads you through a narrative that unfolds in front of you, the ending (or the goal) shifts as your understanding changes over time. In a classroom, the story becomes shared and your individual narrative is quickly lost as the unfolding becomes dictated by the pace of the group (as lead by the teacher). Eventually, you are forced to abandon your curiosity for the sake of “keeping up” with the class.

What learning activities best support curiosity development and foster a sense of wonder in children?
It is probably not useful to generalize this too much – every person has a unique sense of curiosity – but I find the best engagement comes from activities which support individual paths of exploration and are open-ended (as opposed to typical lab and kit-based experiences which lead a class through a formulaic series of steps to get everyone to the same conclusion). To create or discover something on your own terms is so much more thrilling than to be lead to a conclusion.

By example, suppose that we gave some kids a box of parts and asked “What do these want to be?” They immediately sort through the parts, looking at each one, and then as they start to develop a sense of what they have to work with they proceed to make things that are wholly unique and personal – a blend of engineering, aesthetics, and serendipity. They experience frustration, hilarity, and triumph. As time passes they re-evaluate the pieces in the box as new understanding brings new opportunities, and they continue to rebuild, redesign, and refine their creation. Instead of being “done” at the end of class, it exists as a continual work-in-progress.

What advice would you give a new teacher concerned about fostering curiosity in his students?
Be brave. Defend children’s rights to spend time figuring things out, fooling around with things, and to follow their curiosity wherever it may lead. Create a haven for the curious child, reduce unnecessary external measurement of progress or quality of work – in the long run, a powerful curiosity is more valuable than a test score.

Rites of Passage

Cammie, from Mom’s Material just sent me this wonderful story:

Just my son (Myles) and I were at home. We watched part of your video, until after the pocketknife segment. Then I told him I had something special for him. I showed him the pocketknife and said, “When Grandaddy was feeling well, before he went to the hospital, he gave me this pocketknife and told me he wanted you to have it when you were older. After watching the video and realizing you were old enough now, I want to give it to you. I still need to clean it up and sharpen it, we can do that this weekend and I will show you how to use it.”

It was a great moment for several reasons:

He got big tears in his eyes, cried a little because he missed my Dad, and we got to share some fun memories. (they were close)
He felt special, big and more responsible.

What can I say – it brought a tear to my eye as well. These moments of granting responsibility are a gift that we give to children, the knife is merely a symbol.

Self Provocation

There is an inquisitive child inside us all. Sometimes we let it show, and sometimes we bury it in email and seemingly adult responsibilities. Luckily, the curious child escapes sometimes – perhaps to take over our hand while we are on the phone to play with a pen and enjoy the way that it spins on the smooth top of our desk – but we mostly keep it in check, always finding one more important thing to do instead of making time to fool around purely for the sake of it. Compared to all of our many responsibilities, it seems ridiculous to make time for something which has no tangible, measurable, defensible value. But just as a letter grade provides no useful measure of a child in school, neither does a rational analysis of the value of fooling around – the merits are purely intrinsic, the importance often invisible until many years later.

Pick up a nearby object, and feel the weight of it in your hand. You could make a list of questions to quantify the object; #1 How many ways does it stand up? #2 What side does it like to spin on? #3… and so forth, but doing so is an extrinsic process of evaluation and when you had your list complete, you would either set it and the object aside, or you could start to answer each of the questions in turn – but making the list forces us into an analytical understanding of the object. The alternative, and the one most often taken by children, is to just start fooling around with the thing itself – exploring the characteristics of the object without enumerating the questions. In the first approach, the internal model we make of the object is quantified by the questions we ask, in the second approach, the model is more nuanced and the memory of it is in the context of the experience instead of the questions.

I have a camera that I love. By all extrinsic measurements, it’s not that great a camera, but it has some qualities that I have discovered only after carrying it for a few years. These are properties that would never show up on a feature list you could use to compare it to another camera: it’s a perfectly rectangular brick when it is closed, it has a pleasing heft that I can feel in my shirt pocket, it dangles nicely on the nylon lanyard, it has a sliding lock (which does not actually lock) that divides the loop of the lanyard into two smaller loops of infinitely variable size, the battery is spring-loaded so that it pops up when you open the hatch, the flash has a piece of paper taped over it to reduce the intensity. Because of these qualities I carry my camera with me often, and even if I am not taking a picture, it exists as both a physical invitation to play and a reminder that there is something worth looking at wherever I am.

I learned the word “phoretic” this morning because I took a picture of a beetle with a mite riding on it. The mite hangs out with the beetle because the beetle is a better hunter – the mite gobbles up crumbs while the beetle eats. I have, over the years, taken dozens of pictures of insects that visit the back porch, without ever pausing to consider “why” – I take the pictures because I am curious, and that is sufficient justification in my world. For proof of value I need only point out that I might never otherwise have learned the word “phoretic” or any of the other forms of commensalism.

We don’t always know the reason we are doing something, or we may know the reason but not be able to explain it. I have learned over the years at Tinkering School not to ask “What are you doing?” when I see someone engaged in an activity that seems extrinsically pointless. The very questioning of the activity forces the doer to analyze the doing and can completely destroy the nascent value of the experience. If all doing must have a reason, then we force our current interpretation of the value onto an activity whose value may only be understandable in another context at another time. Children in school ask “why do I have to learn Algebra?” and are told “one day it may save your life.” I am certain that this could be said of every moment spent “fooling around” as well.

---

Thanks to Ted C. MacRae, entomologist, and author of the terrific Beetles in the Bush blog for identifying the phoretic relationship of the mite and beetle.

Dangerism

The psychologist Melanie Joy, in her book “Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows,” coins the term “carnism” to describe belief systems or ideologies that allow a culture to selectively choose which animals to eat.

I have had a lot of discussions with parents about which risky activities they will and won’t let their children participate in, and the differences are often striking. Just as there is no necessarily rational basis for choosing which animals are eaten, there appears to be no rational basis for deciding what activities are acceptable for children.

In one recent example, I was talking with a school teacher in Casper, Wyoming, and she described a typical weekend where her son and daughter, ten and eleven, would leave the house in the morning, each carrying a rifle and a backpack with food and water, only to return at dusk after having hiked around all day in the open countryside behind their house. Don’t you worry that something will happen to them out there? Well, she said, there’s a lot less trouble to get into out there in the woods than there is at the mall.

In suburban contexts, it is now common to find parents who drive their children to an empty lot where the child can ride their bike safely – forgetting that the drive on the freeway exposes the child to orders of magnitude more danger than peddling around the neighborhood would.

My mother is fond of telling the story of when I had been left in the care of her sister. Evidently my aunt had taken me to the beach with her children, and I had spent most of the time scampering around on the rocks like a monkey. That evening she called my mother. “I can’t bear to watch him running around on those rocks, but I can’t get him to stop – what should I do?” Don’t watch, said my mother.

So, I propose the term “dangerism” to describe how a culture decides what is and isn’t dangerous. The sources of dangerism can be traced to both personal and social sources. Our individual perception of risk is based on a combination of personal experiences and family history. The cultural aspects of dangerism are probably best described by anthropologists, but the popular news media certainly plays a part in creating exaggerated portrayals of risk.

Some aspects of dangerism come from deliberate simplification of what may be a complex set of reasons to exclude a certain behavior. “Don’t eat mussels harvested in months that have an ‘R’ in the name” is one way to try and prevent people from being poisoned by a water-borne micro-organism that typically blooms in winter months, but if you happen to have a roommate that is a marine biologist you will quickly learn that the rule is really more of a guideline and with proper training you can safely enjoy fresh mussels in March to celebrate Vincent Van Gough’s birthday.

At some point, everyone will own a knife. For some it will be when they graduate from college and get their first apartment, and for the Inuit children who grow up eating seal blubber it will be at age three. In a culture that begins teaching knife skills to toddlers, it does not seem shocking to give a knife to a three year-old. Just as it may seem normal to someone to send an eleven year-old out into the woods with a lunch box and a rifle.

But it’s not all about the quantifiable risks either. If we were all insurance specialists and used actuarial tables to decide which activities were acceptable, I’m sure we wouldn’t do any better. Just as every situation is a unique combination of environmental and social factors, so is every person. What is safe for one person is dangerous for another, and what is safe to do in one location is risky elsewhere.

So, what is the right answer? I’m not sure that I have all of it, but there has to be some accounting of the merits of an activity when assessing the value. We can’t let our fears of what could happen prevent us from letting children engage in meaningful activities. We must assess the risks, weigh the benefits, know the child, and know ourselves – then we just have to try to make the best decision we can.

Projectory

Note: Willi Paul of PlanetShifter.com recently interviewed me via email, and it provided an opportunity to gather some thoughts about Tinkering School and how it operates. This is an excerpt from that interview.

---

Please describe how you would advise us as to your work in Kit-based learning?
We have a term that we use to describe what we look for in a kit-based experience; “projectory”. A simple mashup of the notions of “project” and “trajectory”, projectory is a project that leaves the child on a trajectory that extends the experience beyond the end of the project.

For example, suppose that the project is to build a rope-ladder using recycled materials – there could be elements of rope-making (perhaps from plastic grocery bags), knot-tying, and rung-finding – a simple idea really, but one that only leads to others. Somewhere along the process of making the rope-ladder, the tinkerer will realize that they are building a ladder into a tree – but then what? “I’m going to be sitting up in a tree, I should have a seat…” The ladder provokes ideas, the future expands and unfolds in the child’s mind, taking them beyond the contents of the kit and the initial definition of the project.

---

Now, having just completed the 2009 season of Tinkering School I look back at this interview and see that I still haven’t fully described what we mean by projectory because I have left out the notion of “escape velocity”. The escape velocity of a project is a measure of the participants engagement and the resistance that the project offers to further exploration after it is built. A perfect project is one that has very high engagement (which you can measure by how easily distracted they are during the project) and very low resistance to further exploration.

Joshua’s Toothbrush Boat

By example, electric toothbrush boats are one of the only projects that we have repeated at Tinkering School specifically because it exhibits amazingly high engagement and very low resistance to further exploration. It is quite common to see kids spend more time working on their boats after they get them “done” than they did getting them to that state. Contrast this with the common experience of building a boxed Lego kit with a child – typically there is a moment of joy at the completion of the instructions, followed by a period of play where the finished kit quickly fades out of the limelight.

The importance of these two criteria cannot be understated, in fact they are both required if there is any hope that the child will internalize the concepts that are explored – which must be the goal of creating a learning experience.