When the Critical Thinking in Your 5th Grade Classroom is S L A Y I N G
My jaw was on the floor. I could feel the breeze of actual molecules spinning. Supernovas and gas giants were unfurling into existence at 4:30pm at a South Korean English academy. I was in the presence of some kind of cognitive demigod. Harrison’s in 5th grade.
Our class was reading “Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze.” The main character has a bit of a nervous break down in a haunted house in front of his crush and all his friends. He needs his dad called to pick him up, and is very embarrassed the next day.
Students were asked to share how they would react if they were him.
Never before had I heard such a prodigious analysis of haunted houses from anyone, let alone a kid, than in that moment. Harrison revealed that if he were Milo, he would not be embarrassed at all. He ordained that the true reason for haunted houses is to give people an outlet to express all the fear they feel they cannot express in their day-to-day lives or talk openly about the specific reasons for:
“All my friends would be totally okay with freaking out completely and being as emotional about it as we want, because we all understand how to use a haunted house to ‘say’ what we can’t say.” he said.
“Instead of admitting the real reasons why we’re scared, like about our required military service as South Koreans, we can just say it was the haunted house.”
This awareness came completely from him. It might have been one of the most abundant moments of my teaching career to hear this young boy bring such perspicacity to the table.
Students’ ability to perceive and articulate the existence of the “gray areas” is fully intact by grade 5. The world is no longer black and white. Ideas no longer need to be exclusively polarized into good and bad, right and wrong, safe and dangerous, desirable and undesirable, to ensure students’ logical foundation. Although there are always precocious exceptions to this rule, the rewards of working with students in upper elementary and beyond is specific to this one universal developmental milestone.
I have devoted my life to finding the hero in the wounded villain, the teacher in the enemy, the value in the deplorable, the beauty in the mundane, the order in the chaos. It is utterly rewarding to get to maintain this explorative frequency both in and out of the classroom.
The meticulous study of grand exceptions to blanket establishment is the way of the revolution. To uplift students who are both able and driven to understand how two seemingly opposing ideas can be equally true about one thing has been the apex of my teaching career.
So long as a student is conscious of, and authentically curious to explore what is behind and beyond what is presented on the surface, advanced English proficiency is of secondary importance. What counts the most is advanced emotional maturity with deep listening skills: intuitive awareness of social nuances and ability to self reflect.
What does it mean to be smart these days? Being a fact-spewing machine doesn’t even light a candle anymore. Yet for decades, government-sponsored education has kept the masses tightly suborned.
There are tons of kids as equally as brilliant and insightful as Harrison, but not all of them have been invited out from under the mountain of garbage they’re supposed to memorize long enough to gasp for a breath big enough to make a space inside of themselves for this kind of quality of character to flood in.
Let us keep inviting students out from under the burdens of archaic illusions of intelligence and into a world where critical thinking is tantamount.
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