“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” – Henry Ford
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” – Henry Ford
Source file: Thinking_is_Hard_How_to_Help_Your_Child_Think.docx
Author: Marla Szwast
Created: 2018-04-16 22:24:00
Modified: 2018-04-16 22:47:00
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” – Henry Ford
The first cognitive principal Daniel T. Willingham dives into in his book Why Students Don’t Like School is that while curiosity is natural, thinking is hard. Let’s unpack this principal, which is supported by a large amount of data and has been shown to have a huge impact on student learning, as that is the criteria Willingham demanded for a principal to get into his book.
Your brain does a ton of stuff, all the time, thinking is not the thing it does the best. Our brain helps us see and move, smell and hear, these things it does much more efficiently than and reliably than it thinks. Your brain needs to devote a lot of space to these important functions. “Seeing is actually more difficult than playing chess or solving calculus problems”(Willingham) But it doesn’t feed more difficult, because our brain is better at it.
Thinking is inefficient for three reasons; it is slow, effortful, and uncertain. How fast can you take in a huge scene of visual stimuli? How fast can you solve a Sudoku, can you just glance at it and know where the numbers go? The glance tells you only what it is, a Sudoku, to solve the puzzle you will have to reach past your visual system and engage in some serious thinking.
We can see and hear at the same time. We can even see and hear and think at the same time…except…all those times a spouse or child asked you something while you were busy composing the menu for next week in your head? You were deep in thought…did you hear them? Wait…come back!!! What did I just agree to? We can’t really think about something else while we are thinking. I can even read aloud to my kids while thinking about something else…like…what are we doing about our triple conflict schedule tomorrow afternoon? But when this happens I miss the story, because understand the story requires thought. Even if you are not at that point where you sometimes slip into doing this while reading aloud, most of us have experienced the sensation of reading while thinking about something else, only our brain doesn’t seem to have a clue what we just read and we have to go back a few paragraphs and start again.
Your visual system doesn’t make many mistakes, it usually shows you exactly what is there to see. Keeps you from running off the edge of a cliff, or into a spiky rose bush, useful stuff like that. Your thinking system…not so much. It can give you an answer that is not even close to correct. Or it can refuse to get you to any answer at all. If I throw down a calculus problem right here…you are more likely to not be able to solve it, or to get the wrong answer, than you are to get it correct…(unless you are like my husband and have a masters in mathematics).