For instance, if it was in a primary class, like you say, a teacher might respond, ‘oh yes, these are really like pine cones! Have you seen this pattern on both of them when you look at them from above? {shows picture] What do you notice about that?…’

Is it also partly that as *teacher* of your students, you feel you have to *teach* something, whereas being a parent is more about sociability, passing the time in a nice way? Most of us know that if our young kid says something wrong, it will be corrected without our intervention. Or even that if we start using our child’s funny way of saying something because it’s cute, they will, disappointingly, somehow learn the right way anyway!

Correction can be wrong not just because it impacts identity and ego, but because it isn’t how we learn. We move on, we have new experiences that expand our previous knowledge; they don’t always need to hit our areas of ignorance head-on. We as teachers try to bring about those new experiences.

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I sometimes think about this story of the eastern joke-character Nasrudin in this context:

Two men were quarrelling outside Nasrudin’s window at dead of night. Nasrudin got up, wrapped his only blanket around himself, and ran out to try to stop the noise. When he tried to reason with the drunks, one snatched his blanket and both ran away.
‘What were they arguing about?’ asked his wife when he went in.
‘It must have been the blanket. When they got that, the fight broke up.’

What a lovely thought. Except that Maths is about answers.

To a problem there might be a number of correct answers, a range of answers, an uncertainty about the answers or even no correct answer at all. But without answers, Maths is useless. We might as well be teaching interpretive dance if we are going to go down the road that “math is about thought”. Let’s at least keep one subject that is not subject to relativism and subjectivity.

Dan article discusses how we might steer a misconception into a correct understanding. So that we can get correct answers.

My concern is that asking “How are you thinking about this question right now?” can actually be a lot more stressful to kids than merely correcting them — depending on the kid in question.

A lot of my students know enough that when I am probing them as to their thinking that they must have made a mistake — and so they clam up. They find the process of having their failings displayed at length to the rest of the class much more stressful than merely being wrong. So I never go that route with anxious ones, whereas I am prepared to do it with the bold and brash.