Think, Please

I gave up on my 8th graders last week, got frustrated at how they didn't respect anything down to the time I take to make all these awesome lessons for them all the time, and assigned them workbook pages to do instead.

And I realized something.

They have no idea how to think.

I don't think its a socialized mind thing, where they just refuse to have different opinions from each other for fear of being ostracized, because the school culture just isn't really like that. Also, that's why I let them do almost everything in groups ("open friends" as a teacher of mine used to say). I think that they honestly have been taught to think that if they procrastinate and ask obnoxious questions long enough and hard enough, they will get a frustrated teacher to just feed them the answer, and then they won't actually ever have to put two and two together.

That won't fly in most of the high schools, or the colleges, or the jobs that they want for themselves, so I intend to try to break them of that. I think I need two parts.

First I need to give them the tools (dictionaries, word lists, notes, books, websites, whatever) that they need to find out the answers for themselves. I need to give them the skills, too (translating, or at least picking stuff apart, is just one of those).

Second, I need to stop answering their questions and resist the temptation. I need to ask questions I know they can get, I need to scaffold what I ask and what they ask. But I can't walk around explaining every question to them, or they will learn that someone's always there to do that.

Maybe I need to compile a list of every question they could possibly think up, and then assign them to find out the answers. Maybe I need to have "unanswerables" every day, or something too hard for their pat responses when they come into the room. No more content, no more spitback, but somehow, I want them to actually turn on their brains.

Because they're pretty awesome on the rare occasions when they do.