A Hamster Moment: Thinking about Thinking and Teaching Thinkers

"It is not your business to teach him the various sciences but to give him a taste for them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature. This is assuredly a fundamental principle of all good education." (Rousseau, 1762)

Thinking. It seems that no moment exists within any given day that I am not doing it. So why do I so often feel like the hamster on the thinking wheel, spinning and working, and entertaining an audience who sees that I am going nowhere? I chuckle to myself as I visualize my face and locs on the head of that hamster's body. In my imagination, I visualize an audience at a pet store peering at my predicament. Then IT happens. The wheel breaks loose from the fulcrum base and begins rolling away from the curious crowd. Suddenly, I realize that this exercise wheel practice has allowed me to gain strength and momentum for the moment my real journey was to begin. NOW!

All those years of schooling and programming, learning what I'd been assigned, testing my memory and comprehension of topics I'd been told to chew on, began uploading and updating in my brain at this moment. Now that my wheel is free, I find that I can go faster than I could have gone had I been on foot. All the time I believed my wheel was my prison, but it is moving me faster than I could go alone and protecting my energy for the metacognitive journeys ahead. I recall asking many teachers to explain why I needed to do a specific task or learn a particular skill; how would these minute details help or hinder me by their presence in my already cluttered (or filled with collectibles, depending on one's perspective--and my perspective on any given day) mental file cabinets. Now I understand.

As an educator, I hear the questions asked to me that I used to ask my teachers. I must explain over and again that it is not necessarily the content they must master, but the critical thinking capacity to identify and solve problems, expanding on big ideas and creating pragmatic solutions. Learning how to examine an opportunity (the euphemism for challenge, threat, conflict, or problem) and determine potential avenues for success; plotting a course of action that may require short- and long-term planning; and identifying methods, technologies, relationships that increase the potential for positive global implications are the indicators of a student who will one day have the ability to break free from the fulcrum and ride out his dreams, using a great many of the fundamentals he has learned through his formal education, as well as his informal environment-gathering tendencies.

Thus, Rousseau's quote from 250 years ago remains relevant as many states turn toward the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and transformation strategies infect school districts across the nation. Teaching students to think rather than what to think is the focus of a true education. The CCSS alone are not an answer to the plagues that have ravaged our educational systems (public and private) here in the United States. However, having a common standard allows rigor and expectations to be raised and the habit of some educators of teaching random facts becomes the habit of teaching relevant skills that are applicable to numerous paths of study.

I look forward to seeing progress as we give to the newest generation of students the tools they will need to help build the future into which I must retire and dwell. I hate to sound melodramatic (maybe "hate" is too strong a word here, even), but I am afraid that a generation of American youth missed some critical lessons in thinking and metacognition. However, knowing what I know about hamsters and wheels, even those individuals can lead us by default into a place where we need to be in order to recognize the urgency of the moment. I just hope that this truth is observed, or maybe it is just wishful thinking: Until the hamster is tired of running in place, the fulcrum will not be moved. Then again, those safety nets have caused some of the thinking deficits in the first place. No pain, no gain. Maybe those random crashes into furniture and walls will initiate the metacognition required to learn to want to steer.