We Teach Them to Think

Ryan Lavine, EdS

My wife’s family is from Argentina. One of my brothers-in-law is a nuclear physicist. For reals. I can’t even begin to comprehend the scientific things he has to know in his field of making nuclear power more safe for common use (I think that is his research – sometimes when he gets into any detail I start to glass over like our students do). And he’s a teacher, albeit a self-professed ‘not very good one.’ He teaches Ph.D. students nuclear engineering theory and practice at the institute he graduated from. 

As he was visiting from Argentina during the holiday break between conferences in Santiago, New York, and Paris (all within three weeks), we were discussing what I teach in middle school English. He was fascinated. Though for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why – how does it compare with world travel and being at the forefront of nuclear energy?!

As I was discussing our proprietary PISPA teaching method, I was using the text structure of ‘cause and effect’ as an example. He stopped me, “you teach cause and effect?” Yeah,” I replied, “it is one of the seven text structures.” I didn’t understand the perplexed look on his face and he lower his mate from his mouth. “But,” he came back, with impassioned curiosity in his voice “that’s philosophy.” 

I hadn’t really thought about it. After all, since I first started teaching, I have been so busy trying to continue my education, to understand each new teaching and behavioral method the districts roll out year after year, to get to know my students and help them with their academic, social and emotional trial in middle school, to conference with colleagues and parents, to assess and grade, to plan… the list goes on as you well know. So I never stopped and sat back to think about what we’re really teaching in English class. I said to him, “You never covered cause and effect, fact and opinion, author’s purpose… stuff like that?” He looked at me as if I were crazy. After a brief pause, he replied “No. We never discussed any of those things.” So, being the educational professional that I am (and yes, I am, and so are you) I racked my brain and replied, “Oh, so you covered grammar, spelling, writing mechanics… stuff like that.” “Yes,” he replied. And that made sense. That is a lot of what I learned in middle school English as well (1993-1995). When I started teaching several years later, the shift (in the United States) had already taken place (at least where I taught – Title 1 campuses in three different states) from (I guess what I’ll call) the mechanics of language to studying the ideas and theory behind that spoken and written language. 

In considering cause and effect as philosophy (as opposed to, or in addition to English), our good friends over at Wikipedia said, “… causality is built into the conceptual structure of ordinary language. In Aristotelian philosophy, the word ’cause’ is also used to mean ‘explanation’ or ‘answer to a why question.”

Why, then, I’ll ask, the shift? Why are we no longer (perhaps able to) focus on crafting mechanical reading and writing skills at the middle school level? Why do we need to spend so much time studying making inferences and drawing conclusions (and yes, they’re different)? What was the cause of this effect?

The answer is… well, we could spend an entire course studying and discussing why we’ve made the shift. That won’t be answered here…

You’ve heard the phrase we tell the community, “We don’t teach them what to think, we teach them how to think,” and though I appreciate that sentiment, I’d like to remove the how and simply say that, as teachers, “we teach them to think.” The ‘what’ and ‘how’ is really up to the learners to develop over time based on a variety of foundations such as their education, values, and beliefs.

So, yes, as middle school English language arts teachers, we do teach philosophy along with the mechanics of the language. We teach them to think. We teach them something they will use in absolutely everything they will do from the moment you teach them to the day they pass on. You teach them to think – and who knows what they’ll do with that in their lifetime. Really, when you think about it… it’s invaluable. 

Ryan Lavine is a middle school English language arts teacher and content editor for www.varsityed.com