For the past few years our team at Sparkling Mindz has been engaged in creating activities for children to enable them to think and communicate their thinking process. At the very outset we began an uphill battle with this simple thing called the "eraser". What we observed was that it was simple sure, but could severely limit the thinking process. How? You might ask and rightly so. We have all grown up using the eraser and loved its elegance, right?
As part of our activities there always comes a time that children record their ideas, thoughts, capture their imagination in pictures/words and time and again, we saw children looking up from their work because they had made a mistake and wanted an eraser urgently to erase it. Sometimes, they would go rushing about the room in the hope that they would find one that allowed them to erase their "so called mistakes". In fact the next class some of them even bought an eraser from home! Most of the times when we looked at the so called "mistake" they wanted to erase in their work, it was a very tiny little mistake – a wrong line here or a curve gone haywire there, a letter a bit shaky or a word out of place – nothing much compared to the quantum of thinking they just disrupted to go look for the eraser! (Sometimes, it was a clear indication of the fact that no real thinking was probably happening)
We did a nice little trick at our centers, we banished the eraser! We told the children the erasers had gone for a walk and would come back when they were ready to tidy up their work.
What we realized was that in our education system, it was easy for the teachers to focus on neatness, it was not a process it was an outcome. Easy to see, easy to grade, easy to appreciate. Hence, all attention was diverted to a neat outcome vs. a thoughtful one (which was of course process oriented). In fact, this amount of focus on a single dimension (neatness) cultivates an underlying assumption in a novice learner that ‘learning cannot be messy’
To me, it has greater implications in terms of stifling the very process of creative thinking itself – where mistakes are not only permissible, they are essential part of the thinking process. In fact there is no concept of something being ‘wrong’ or a ‘mistake’, else how will one generate lots of ideas? how will one think out of the box? if you are constantly self-censoring yourself and correcting what you ‘assume’ to be mistakes!
Additionally, it also shows a larger inability for the learner to let go of a small error and focus on the larger goal at hand of generating ideas, thinking and owning the learning process itself. After all in life, we cannot erase mistakes, we have to learn to live with them right?
Obsession with neatness is killing the learning process and the learner in our children. The eraser needs to be banished from classrooms until children have learnt to think for themselves – let them be messy!
As one of my professors in college used to say, "I know how much thinking you have done by how messy your book is!"
As part of our activities there always comes a time that children record their ideas, thoughts, capture their imagination in pictures/words and time and again, we saw children looking up from their work because they had made a mistake and wanted an eraser urgently to erase it. Sometimes, they would go rushing about the room in the hope that they would find one that allowed them to erase their "so called mistakes". In fact the next class some of them even bought an eraser from home! Most of the times when we looked at the so called "mistake" they wanted to erase in their work, it was a very tiny little mistake – a wrong line here or a curve gone haywire there, a letter a bit shaky or a word out of place – nothing much compared to the quantum of thinking they just disrupted to go look for the eraser! (Sometimes, it was a clear indication of the fact that no real thinking was probably happening)
We did a nice little trick at our centers, we banished the eraser! We told the children the erasers had gone for a walk and would come back when they were ready to tidy up their work.
What we realized was that in our education system, it was easy for the teachers to focus on neatness, it was not a process it was an outcome. Easy to see, easy to grade, easy to appreciate. Hence, all attention was diverted to a neat outcome vs. a thoughtful one (which was of course process oriented). In fact, this amount of focus on a single dimension (neatness) cultivates an underlying assumption in a novice learner that ‘learning cannot be messy’
To me, it has greater implications in terms of stifling the very process of creative thinking itself – where mistakes are not only permissible, they are essential part of the thinking process. In fact there is no concept of something being ‘wrong’ or a ‘mistake’, else how will one generate lots of ideas? how will one think out of the box? if you are constantly self-censoring yourself and correcting what you ‘assume’ to be mistakes!
Additionally, it also shows a larger inability for the learner to let go of a small error and focus on the larger goal at hand of generating ideas, thinking and owning the learning process itself. After all in life, we cannot erase mistakes, we have to learn to live with them right?
Obsession with neatness is killing the learning process and the learner in our children. The eraser needs to be banished from classrooms until children have learnt to think for themselves – let them be messy!
As one of my professors in college used to say, "I know how much thinking you have done by how messy your book is!"
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