Why?

I really like why questions.

Perhaps it's because my own kids are young and love to learn and ask me Why? all the time.  But you know what? I don't mind for a second...in fact, love these questions and the places they take us. I'm innately curious and I'm an extrovert. In fact, I'd sit in my kitchen all morning, holding court with my three kids while they pepper me with questions that send us down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

You see, I love stories and I love connections and I love ideas. I also happen to love my children, but that's beside the point. I used to ask questions when I was anxious as a little kid. If my mother was late coming home, I would ask my father a series of questions, hoping that the divergent and spidering directions our conversation took us would distract me from my concern for my mom's well-being. We didn't have a television and cellular phones were not yet commonplace if they'd been invented at all. So I learned to listen and I learned to love the questions as much as the answers, themselves.

I was reminded of this recently when my dad sent me a text message containing the following video clip from the late physicist, Richard Feynman (start it at 55 seconds). My father wrote, among other things,

"...I came across a video clip that brought you and fatherhood echoing across generations..."

The Why questions are one of the reasons I'm a teacher as well. Schools ask these questions all the time, both in classrooms and around campus. Or, at least, they should. I know our faculty did earlier this year when we watched Simon Sinek's TED talk about starting with "Why?".

This week, as I reflected on my own dad, on my own childhood, and on my own fathering of my kids, I was drawn to these questions in my students.

It made me think of the ways that we question (or don't question) things in an effort to understand them: the ways we ask Why? of others and the ways we ask Why? of ourselves.

So much of my work with my students is about helping them see the value in skepticism, a trait that I believe rests at the heart of critical thinking.

So how does this all connect to what I did in the classroom this week? Well, I showed the Feynman clip to my students and pulled an old poster off my wall entitled "How to Build Global Community." It was made by Syracuse Worker's Union, had been a gift from my mother and has been on my wall for about four years.

I asked my students if they'd noticed it and most said they had not.

So off the wall it came.

I read off the list of thirty ways to build community and asked my students to select one of the items to work with. When each of them had selected something from the list (everything from "Oppose NAFTA" to "Join a cooperative" to "Learn people's history" to "Eat organic" was included), I told them to question the thing they'd chosen.

Sure, the list had a very liberal bias, but that was part of the exercise. I wanted them to question the bias...to decide for themselves whether there was merit in the list instead of just absorbing/ingesting/consuming it as truth.

I wanted one student to ask,

Why should I not wear corporate logos?

while another asked,

Why should I join a credit union?

What happened, was thirty minutes of magic during which my students didn't just settle for asking one Why question, they made whole lists of them! Some students even made lists of the counter-arguments and why someone shouldn't do the things listed.

Now,  through this simple exercise, we've begun to lay the groundwork for growing a norm in our classroom. My students know I will ask Why? but also that I expect them to question me as well. I want them to push me to defend why we're spending 45 minutes talking about Mansa Musa if he died seven centuries ago, or why the format of next Monday's test is open note.

If they're asking questions with one skeptical eyebrow cocked, I know they're engaged, and if they're engaged I can lead them to water with the hope that one day, when each of them are ready in their own way, they'll drink. Because for those 30 minutes, I saw how thirsty they were.

Why?

Because they were made for this.