Good thinking in education

¶ … Education

Good thinking is neither too specific nor too abstract. For example, take the counselor who just listens to her clients, without forcing them to engage in meaningful soul-searching. "Yes, of course, your children won't listen to you," the counselor says, nodding sympathetically. At the end of the session, the client leaves, momentarily feeling better, but without gaining any productive strategies to improve her children's behavior. Instead, the client acts as she always does, yelling at the children at the top of her lungs to do their homework and to do their chores, just as her own mother acted towards her as a child. If the therapist had found a productive way, through probing questions, such as 'what if you gave them the ability to choose their own lunch, would that motivate them to make their lunch before they went to bed' this might help the woman think of better ways to run a more orderly and less stressful household. Questioning the woman might also help the client understand how she had learned to equate discipline with anger when she was a little girl and the session would have been far more productive. Of course, if the specific problem was not addressed, and the therapist simply spoke in abstract terms about childrearing, the woman would leave, not understanding how to apply the concepts to her life. Good thinking is critical and meaningful.

Good thinking is not simply useful for adults trying to struggle to understand complicated issues, however. Even for children, good thinking is important. No one is too young to learn good thinking. I remember when I was trying to learn my multiplication tables as a child. I would constantly forget them, because they seemed like meaningless lists of numbers. I would try and try, but I could never remember what numbers came next. But when my teacher sat down, and explained that 2X2=4 with two sets of brown M&Ms being put together to equal four brown M&Ms, and so forth, I began to understand the multiplication tables as adding together groups of things, that the tables were not just about memorized lists of numbers.

This made learning concrete, and also made learning an experience for me, a tactile experience just like I learned addition, trying to figure out how many pieces of bubble gum and tiny candy bars I could buy with the dollar my mother gave me, when I went shopping with her as a toddler. This was very useful to me later in life, when I was trying to learn how to solve mathematical word problems. Many students who had just learned to manipulate numbers on the page had no idea what pluses and minus signs had to do with adding or subtracting apples from oranges. Only by actively imagining yourself in a store, and going through the physical processes of purchasing and figuring out change do mathematical concepts become real to a young child.