Sure, There’s Such a Factor as a Silly Query

They are saying there are not any silly questions, however I encourage to vary. We hear silly questions nearly each time adults and younger youngsters are collectively. 

As an illustration, a toddler is portray at an easel, exploring coloration, form, and movement, experimenting with brushes, paper, and paint. There’s an grownup watching over her shoulder who factors and asks, “What coloration is that?”

It is a silly query. 

Here is one other instance: a toddler is enjoying with marbles, exploring gravity, movement and momentum. An grownup picks up a handful of marbles and asks, “What number of marbles do I’ve?”

The grownup already is aware of the reply. The kid in all probability does as properly, by which case, the grownup is distracting her from her deep and significant research in an effort to reply to a banality. Or she does not know the reply, by which case the grownup is distracting her from her deep and significant research to play a guessing sport.

In a second, these silly questions take a toddler who’s engaged in testing her world, which is her correct position, and turns her right into a check taker, compelled to reply different individuals’s questions quite than pursue the solutions to her personal.

If it is essential that the kid know these particular colours and numbers at this particular second, and it in all probability is not, then we must always do the cheap factor and easily inform her,”That is pink,” or “I’ve three marbles.” If it isn’t new data, and it in all probability is not, she’s free to disregard you as she goes about her enterprise of studying. If she did not know, now she does, in context, as she goes about her enterprise of studying.

That is in all probability the best offense we commit in opposition to youngsters in our present academic local weather of testing, testing, and extra testing. We yank youngsters away from their correct position as self-motivated scientists, testing their world by asking and answering their very own questions, and as an alternative drive them to turn into check takers, occupying their brains with our silly questions.