This week I put a “puzzle” up for students to do during a break for which I didn’t have the answer – and I told them this. Some students, who usually ‘get it quickly’ got frustrated when they couldn’t work out the answer straight away, some stayed and some walked away. One student came the next day and said “Miss I spent 2 hours on that problem last night and I still haven’t got the answer” :) , another student spent the 2nd lesson of the double working it out on the whiteboard and still didn’t have an answer but you could see he thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of finding links in the maths that he knew to try and find the answer.

My statement during this was is it’s not the “answer” that is the most important but the journey of finding out what works and what doesn’t. Everyone can say ‘Oh I should have done this and that’ with hindsight.

I love this post because it gets to the beating heart of everything– the distinction, as Jim P. puts it, between what we (and our students) SAY we value and what we (and our students) ACTUALLY value. You have to open up to the reality of what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW in order to value – and even to notice – whether or not the intellectual need in the room is genuine.

The only thing I would add is that for me, the binary distinction of puzzled/unpuzzled is too limited. It’s more goal-directed than curiosity can be. There is a kind of ecstasy to simply noticing what is going on (and its attendant “becoming worshipfully curiosity”) that is intrinsically motivating in itself. I notice that I don’t always CARE about the goal of becoming unpuzzled if the experience of puzzlement truly captivates me.

Students can be curious about all kinds of things beyond the physics of the “real world.” Thanks for this reflection.

– Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeysf)

Many kids will ask this question just to ask it regardless of how relevant the information is.

Kids are naturally curious about the world. At a certain point and in certain situations, that gets shut down. The “the electric sensation of being puzzled and the catharsis that comes from being unpuzzled” is about being awake, aware and totally present in the moment – alive.

I am eager to bring a new, clearer understanding and a deeper, more conscious perspective to HLM and the kids I work with in the classroom.