Answers. The main quest for students?

I kind of think that the answer is rather boring. We have a lot of answers. 47 may be an answer. Or green. Or even Iceland. I don't know, and I don't think I really care. The questions are much more interesting! Where does the white colour go when the snow melts? How would our furniture look like if our knees were bending backwards? We can take pictures with our cellphones, why haven't anyone invented a camera witch can be used as a phone? The list of questions is endless. But we always look for the answer.

My point is this: We know a lot of stuff, but we (often) can not explain why things are the way they are. Is the flow of information so breathtaking that we just acknowledge everything for what they are, or what we believe them to be, or don't we see the fantastic things that surrounds us because we've become used to take it all for granted?





This leads to another question. Do we create our own truth? As Adam Savage in the TV-series Mythbuster says: "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"



Mythbusters has a quest, just as Monty Python had a quest. Both of them are, in a way, looking for the Holy Grail.


 


 

Eyafjallajökull has erupted, and this causes a lot of headlines in all kinds of media. I could of course discuss the troubles this causes for air-traffic, but I won't. In stead I will tell you about another incident that happened in class just yesterday. "How does a volcano work?" was the question from a student. Well, I connected my computer to a projector and found this page. One animation explains how Africa and South-America was connected app. 140 million years ago. When I was showing this to the class, I suddenly was cut off by a student shouting "Lies!!" And then he referred to this page, claiming the earth is just app. 10000 years old, and everything else is just a lie. There were, in fact, no human life on earth until app. 6000 years ago.

 

We all create our own understanding of our surroundings, adapting and assimilating impressions as we are exposed to new knowledge. I believe that my quest is to teach my students how to "filtrate", analyze, and think through the information they may find, if it's on TV, Google, Wikipedia, in books, newspaper or parents. One of our quests as teachers must be to develop critical thinking ourselves, and then be able to pass some of our knowledge to our students. Just take a look at what Wikipedia tells us about media literacy here. We all need to train our critical sense.