Asking questions in Class

With today comes another round of blogspot.com outages; this time a complete crash of their networking system. Everything is sort of going to pot over there this week. Hopefully this will not cause this post to be unduly delayed.

There have been two recent experiences about how classes answer questions that I would like to share. In an elementary class, the mix of high energy and boundless creativity is volatile. When all students in a class know the answer – and everyone yelling - the result can be hard to ignore. A cacophony is a good way to describe it. This is the more common result. One class in particular, this year’s grade two’s, has the extremely odd habit of putting their hands up to answer even when no question has been posed. My face often scrunches up in a look of odd bewilderment; this is also accompanied by the impulse to smile. I would really like to understand what is going on in their heads.