I was recently in a classroom where the kids were doing times tables practice. I don’t know my times tables, well I have a wee gap, but I can work them out or use a calculator. The class practiced by first playing bingo, then had individual quizzes on a specific times table. When it was not your turn to have the quiz you were supposed to listen = learn. Then at the end of the week they had a timed (the teacher kept a record of their times) filling in of a times tables quiz, (competition?). As a child I couldn’t have coped with the performance part of it or the timed part. The kids appeared to like this, well some of them reminded me to give them the test. I can understand the security of knowing the ritual and the comfort of there being an answer that was fixed and all you have to do is recall it, you don’t have to think, it’s kind of reassuring, predictable… However there is a problem with having the focus on the RIGHT answer. I realise in this case that there is a correct answer and the question for that answer is simple. I just felt it was a bit like the children were performing monkeys getting a dopamine hit by their easy pat on the head – well for those who can perform under those public and timed conditions of course, the under performers were just learning they were thick or bad at Maths. The kids had the security in the world having order perhaps.

I thought about the right answer during the last lockdown, which was nearly 4 weeks, as we had a stranger live with us. He is a cousin of a friend and was passing through on his way to seasonal work and exploring Te Waiponamu. I found it extremely interesting because he doesn’t know the same things as us. Some of these things were cultural, like we try to use as little plastic as possible but there is glad wrap in the cupboard (for burns) so he used it as it wasn’t an issue for him, what he knew and cared about was just different. He did at one point make a comment about us being Green, so there must have been some unconscious telling/learning. He knows a lot of things that I will never know. I still don’t grasp what a concept artist is. I make assumptions because I have my particular world view and mostly I meet people more or less the same as me – class, race, education and an emphasis on the intellectual and science, family background, politics etc. I am sure that we were as alien to our visitor as they were to us. An old flat-mate and I once had a discussion on this being set in our ways (having the right answer) and that maybe this meant we weren’t able to accommodate others. We did not have the same ways, though, and I found it challenging to look at how she hung out her washing (though my Dad does it the same way). It seems it is impossible not to imply a correct answer. I do want H to forge her own path. However, I suspect having no answer, as if one could create such an environment, makes you too adrift and is psychologically damaging.

There are many was of learning the right answer – by observation or explicit teaching, and different kind of answers – cultural answers and fact answers. For example there is a way I feel is the right way to say Helena’s name – Helen with an long a said at the end. I used to work with a woman who consistently got this wrong so every time she said Helena’s name wrong I would use Helena’s name correctly in a sentence thinking it rude to correct her… however this woman never noticed so was unable to learn by subtle feedback and in the end I corrected her, she didn’t seem to mind so I guess direct teaching is how she learnt things.

At teachers college we had long discussions about whether or not to let children have an ‘ah ha’ moment working out the right answer themselves or use a “deliberate act of teaching” to tell them how to do something as this saves time, prevents misconceptions and keeps the turning of the Education wheel at the right speed. This seemed predominantly applied to maths and science. How ever the best maths lesson I remember had no deliberate acts of teaching. I was relieving a class of youngish (they didn’t seem to be quite at the multiplying level) kids and I had just been reading about rich maths (where there both is and isn’t a right answer and no deliberate teaching by the adult, it’s open ended). I chose a 2 digit number and asked the kids to find as many questions as they could to get that answer. We ended up doing this for over an hour, all of them on the floor, bits of paper and pens everywhere. We talked about big ideas like finite/infinite. I could see some kids using a system to generate questions, thinking about the order of the numbers in their questions, properties of subtraction versus addition, order of the addends. Everyone was engaged as they were working together and all it takes is a couple of enthusiastic kids (or teacher) to suck the others in and if you weren’t a writer someone else could be. The task had security yet still an opportunity to be creative, and to have big thoughts. I don’t remember if we had discussions on what to do with kids who had the fear of giving the wrong answer.

It doesn’t always feel good knowing the right answer – like when you get good at a particular card game. As a child I use to choose when to let others win card games so they would keep playing, but now I find it hard to play games when I know ‘the answer’, of course there is still chance and still the people, but knowing the answer means it feels like a tedious ritual. I am sure I am not the only person who feels this, surely every one who has played Cluedo knows that feeling. I have noticed when I resort to testing style, one right answer questions, on Helena I see her loosing interest and she finds ways of answering that change the game into a wind Mum up game which I always loose. We present much of Science and Maths like this – a done deal, questions that have already been answered, certainly at primary school level. Making kids do stuff we know the answer to. How depressing, it’s just stuff to learn/regurgitate.

There are times when knowing the right answer is critical (at the supermarket till) yet there are times where there isn’t, and there can’t be, a right answer and we totally accept this. For example art. When Helena does art she often asks me “do you like it?” Is that her seeking some way of doing it right? Is having no answer just too big? A lot of art in schools has a format to get that lovely calendar art, blow pen trees etc., and you can see that there is a rightish answer, you can get it right. There is some often quoted research from the 60s about 5 year olds being creative and how we loose this as we age, Ken Robinson’s TeD talk, and go through the school system learning the right answer. That there is one right answer is a creativity killer. Everyone can learn facts, practice skills like times tables but once you are trapped in the mindset that there is a right answer, someone else found it and it is your job to recall it you have a massive barrier to learning that is hard to surmount.

Lots of those right answers are to big life decisions and cultural decisions. Our education system, for instance, believes (promotes) the idea that school, as in book learning -eg to read, should start at 5. The answer for children is to start school at the same time at five. Yet all current research done by people like Nathan Mikaere-Wallis (Brain wave Trust says that you shouldn’t be teaching reading until 7- even Piaget said this). Even the dyslexia course I went on was promoting just a different way of teaching learning to read rather than challenge the right answer of teaching five year olds to read.

The main thing that dismayed me in the classroom I was in was not the speedy times tables kids or that they were equally as good at the filling in the algorithm ‘long multiplication’ but that they never played with this concept. One of them had wondered aloud about how many seconds in a year but never thought to find out and only did when it became the right answer to a question in his maths book!! Their teacher even told me not to give them an open ended task. The focus on the right answer had crippled these children.

There is no right answer to the problems we face with our planet at the moment. Let’s ensure that the young brains come with open minds or we might miss out on some right answers.

I wrote that years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t publish it… worried I was wrong?