What is Five?

When I first started teaching grade 3 in 1979 I quickly noticed two
student behaviours that drove me crazy. When I walked around the room
to check on students’ work there seemed to be a relationship between
the closer I came to their desk and the rotation of the student’s
pencil. They would slowly turn to point the eraser at their page. The
second behaviour is related. I will use Arithmetic for the example, but
any subject could substitute. I noticed that when I asked a question,
say, “What is 3+2?” Students would invariably answer, “5?” They would
answer the question with a question! In so much of what the students
were doing they were demonstrating a fear of being wrong or at least
deferring the arbitration of the correct answer to me, the teacher. I
hated that!

It didn’t take me to long to solve the first behaviour. I started wearing soft-soled shoes to school. The students
couldn’t hear me coming so they didn’t worry about turning their pencil
over in time. The answer to the riddle of the second behaviour took
much longer. As a matter of fact, I am still learning ways to apply the
solution. I at first tried many different ways to get them to
say, “5!” I drilled them with worksheets, I had them use manipulatives,
hours of homework were assigned. I was determined to find a way.
Finally, it dawned on me. Students were willing to pass to me their
sense of truth, their sense of knowing, and their sense of correctness.
As a teacher and authority figure, why didn’t I find that flattering?

I wanted the students to act with confidence. I wanted them to be
creative. I wanted them to have courage and optimism. I wanted them to
discover for themselves and not believe me because I was their teacher,
or I was older, or I wore glasses, or I was starting to lose my hair or
for any other reason. I finally figured out that I had to ask a
different question. Instead of asking, “What is 3+2?” I started
asking, “What is 5?” At first the students were quite uncomfortable
with this. “What does he want?” “Is he crazy?” Eventually, we filled up
the room with chart papers exploring the question. We could spend a
week on, “What is 5?” Students could write an infinite number of
responses: 1+1+1+1+1; 8-3; 20 divided by 4; The square root of 25. Some
of their responses were even “wrong”, but if left alone, would
eventually either be corrected, or forgotten.

The key was that every student could answer the question in his or her own way in
varying degrees of complexity that they knew was correct. I now saw my
job as finding ways to encourage them to increasingly make their
responses more complex. Sometimes, based on the work that they
were doing, I might have to ask a probing question that would provide
information that they didn’t have but was needed to increase the
complexity of their answer. The challenge was to only give them just
enough so that what they discovered was truly their own discovery.

I found that students loved working like this. When they realized that
they had the power to generate an infinite number of correct responses,
it became even easier to zero in on the one that they would have to use
when they went to Safeway to buy apples, or to the bowling alley to add
their score. Then, my challenge as a teacher was to find ways to ask,
“What is five?” across the curriculum.

There is power in creativity, not memorizing answers. There is power in returning to
their own sense of inner-truth about how to interpret the world around
them. This is a power that they had at an earlier age, but for some
reason seems to escape them the further they go along in school. There
is power in finding many solutions to the question, and then choosing
the one that best fits the context.

Many people have spoken and written about how, if projected far enough, the future is unknown. The
problems that we are going to have to face for the most part are not
yet even realized. Our hope to face the future issues lies within our
ability to be creative.

I am no longer teaching in the classroom. My work now deals mostly with principals, vice-principals,
and parents. I still see my basic job as the same. How do I find ways
to help people approach their challenges with courage, confidence and
optimism? How do I persuade principals and vice principals that they
need to be prepared to risk being wrong in order to find ways of
responding creatively to the particular context of their school?