What do you think about how you think?

I teach English to eighth-grade scholars at a Texas Charter School, and every year I ask my kids the same question: What is the first thing you do when you think? Sometimes a class will come up with the answer pretty quickly, and other times it takes quite a long time—sometimes the whole class period, which for us is an hour and a half. The answer that I'm looking for is quite easy to be found; however, many times it is not obvious. 

Some kind of thing in the grass.

  The scholars will say, “Well, I just come up with something,” or, “You know, you just —think,” or "You just have to try to think.” They will then shift to say things like, "Why can't you tell us the answer?” “Why is this so hard?” "This is dumb! I don't even see why we're doing this! Why are you making us do this?” “Why are you wasting our time like this? Why can’t you just tell us the answer?” The funny thing is that much of the time they do the exact thing that is the answer.

As you can see, the answer is…one asks questions. 

This idea will sometimes just sail right over an eighth-grade scholar’s head. “How is asking questions like thinking?” they will ask.

Here is why the answer is hard to see: They don't break it down into the small questions, the kind one would ask as a little kid. The kind of very basic and simple kinds of questions one who is maturing won’t really ask out loud anymore. 

To help them understand, I will have the students do this mental exercise: 

“Imagine you went and looked out of the window and saw something moving across the grass. As one tries to figure out what one just saw, most of us would not verbalize all of the questions that might run through one's head, but what if one did verbalize them?

“Oh, what is that? Is it in the distance? What is that moving across the grass? Why is it doing that? How is it doing that? I wonder what it possibly could be?”

These questions are many times not expressed; nonetheless, those questions are still being posed but tacitly in the mind. The questions are just being presented very quickly because the brain is fast. Then the inquiry begins to change from just asking questions to answering some of the questions one is asking. For instance:

"What is that thing? What are its parts? It’s some kind of animal. What is that black covering? It looks kind of furry; it has four legs! It could be a dog. Wait! it has a tail! What is it with the tail? It is moving in a way that is not consistent with what I know about dogs. So, could it be a cat? It has two ears and markings that remind me of a …yes! it is a cat!

Notice that more statements are beginning to be made, and what emerges is a conversation of questioning and answering that occurs in one’s own head, where one’s-self takes the position of both the questioner and the answerer. This is, of course, happening in the imagination.

Here one is desperately trying to take that new thing on the outside that one doesn’t know, and connect them in some way to what one already knows. A person will check the questions he or she asks against the knowledge that one already has in one’s memory. Sometimes one has the answer and sometimes one does not, but one is trying to find a place, a definition, or category—some way to remember and have a distinction for this new information or for the as-yet-unanswered-question.

For instance, people would say, “Well it looks like a… And it moves like a… And it's coloring is like a…”

This is why having a well-developed imagination is so important. The questioning and answering in the imagination is where one makes decisions about any new information, whether it should be memorized, disregarded, or action taken based on where there is need.

Now, there are several ways that this can happen, but here is a paraphrase of an idea that I’ve heard about fifteen years ago from Andrew Kern of the Circe Institute. He says that Asking questions is thinking. If one needs an answer, it is easy to get just any kind of answer—especially wrong answers—but if one needs good answers, then one must need to ask good questions. And the quality of the questions one asks will give the better quality of answers that one needs. The better answers, the better quality of life you will have. Of course, the question is then, What are the good questions? Are there some questions that are better than others? Well, these are very good questions and the kind of quality questions that bring good answers.

In the next several posts, I will take a closer look into these Good Questions.