How do you teach someone to think?

It's that time of year again...yes, the holidays, but also, the end of the first marking period of the year. While it might be the most wonderful time of the year on the radio, it is definitely not for a lot of students in my class. Report card time is always interesting to me for several reasons. First, in my second year of teaching I am still struggling to understand how a student who has turned in very little homework, failed to complete a major project, and refused to answer half the questions on the tests I give because they aren't multiple choice and therefore don't seem to be as easy could be shocked when the grade on their report is not an A, B, or C. I guess in part its a failure on the part of the teachers to demonstrate that cause and effect relationship effectively, but still, it always amazes me.

Second, though, I find it interesting to try and answer many of the kids questions about why they got the grade they did. It's easy with some kids: the ones with A's and B's don't ask why, they're just happy they got the grade, and the ones who never turned in work- well, clearly that's why. What is tough, though, are the kids who did turn in a lot of the work and thought they were genuinely making a serious effort and who still ended up with D's based off test, quiz, and major classwork and project grades. Despite my efforts to offset some of this with mini-quizzes, quiz retakes, and daily points for participation and effort, there is always a batch of kids who fall in the low C or D range who are truly upset they got this score, and I can understand why- they thought they were putting in adequate effort, and have suddenly realized they have fallen short of their goal in my class. After this, I almost always hear, "But I'm doing so much better in my other classes! Why not in your class?" This always leads to me to go back and wonder: am I being unfair to students? However, I don't think so, and here's why.

In many of my students other classes, I think (I don't know, since I'm not in those classes) that students get graded on how much stuff they hand in, regardless of how much it seems like they have learned. In my class, on the other hand, I am attempting to really grade my students on how much they have learned and how much thinking they have done that marking period. It is relatively easy in a social studies class to memorize basic facts and spit them back out (What is cuneiform? Who was Aristotle? What are latitude and longitude?). It is more important to me, however, that my students learn how to really analyze these things- why does it matter that Mesopotamians used cuneiform, or that we still study Aristotle today? And this is a stumbling block. My students do not like to do this kind of thinking because they have never been taught to- when you can get an A for copying poems offline that have examples of simile and metaphor in them, why ever bother to think about the purpose of those similes and metaphors? Therefore, I come off looking like this incredibly difficult teacher who expects too much of my students because I ask so much more of them- but let's be honest, this is what the kids in the suburbs of Philadelphia are doing every day-thinking.


By no means am I even close to being that good at this-if I was, perhaps it wouldn't be such a battle in my classroom every day. I have not yet gotten the hang of asking just the right guiding question to get my students to draw a conclusion from the material in front of them. So, it's my goal for this semester to see many more A's and B's- but not because I've gotten any easier as a teacher, but because I've challenged my students (and myself!) to be better and finally started to win this battle against not wanting to think and analyze with my students. Anything else is shortchanging them and allowing them to fall short of their true potential.