Would You Like a Spoon?

"I know you don't know how to do this because we have never done it before."

This was a teacher to her students during a math lesson.  I believe two things to be true: 1. a quarter of those students already knew how to do it and 2. another quarter could have figured it out if they had been given 5 minutes.

But they weren't.  Their spoons were taken and bite by bite they were fed the steps, the procedures and the lesson.

It's hard for teachers to let go of the "I Do" in gradual release.  Many believe this is where we must start because we are the holder of the knowledge.

But we are taking their spoons.

"Oh, they can't read cursive."

How do you know?  Have you ever give them a passage in cursive to see if they can figure it out?  My 6 year old nephew opened a birthday card that was written in cursive and read it aloud to everyone.  Why?

Because no one had ever told him that he couldn't read in cursive.

It's like the fable of the bumblebee; it flies because it doesn't know it can't.  My 10th graders used to cry: We can't read in cursive! Please, besides the F, B, Z and an occasional Q, the letters are easy to figure out.  And I write in prursive (print-cursive).  But they thought that because they were not taught to read in cursive, they could not read in cursive.

A bigger sin than refusing to hand over the spoon to let students tackle, solve, grow confidence, is taking their spoons when they offer them to you.

There's a class I work with regularly and they want to be told EVERY. SINGLE. STEP.

Take my spoon!  Feed me!  Take away my responsibilities, the chance I could be wrong, the chance of making a mess!

And we take the spoon.  Willingly, even eagerly, because we know we can do it better, faster, smarter and with a lot less mess.We take away their opportunity to problem solve, to create another wrinkle in the brain, to create new pathways of information and understanding.  To discover.

It's hard to watch kids struggle; it's hard to watch anyone struggle.  But that's how we learn.  It's how we grow.

They will stop offering you the spoon eventually.  Because they will have so much confidence, they will know they can do it themselves.  Let us provide not knowledge, but opportunity, because that is what truly separates the haves from the have-nots.