Knowing and I Don’t Knowing
As the coordinator for the Detroit Future Schools program, I get to visit 12 classrooms all over the Metro-Detroit area every month. Grades range from third grade up through twelfth. School focuses range from the basics to aeronautics. Class sizes ranging from ten to thirty-five students. I’m learning more right now about schooling and learning (the two are not synonymous) than I did as an undergrad earning my teaching certificate. Every class has a unique personality–a unique pulse–but one thing remains the same…
In every classroom I’ve visited, I hear the phrase “I don’t know.” It is most commonly used in response to a teacher asking a student a question and the student passive-aggressively responding by mumbling, “I don’t know,” shrugging his/her shoulders and at all costs, avoiding eye contact with the teacher.
I eliminated this option for all students in my classroom. In bold letters on hot neon-colored paper, I taped this slogan for all to see from the beginning to the end of the school year:
“What you don’t know today, you will know tomorrow.”
This slogan, from the start of the school year until about mid-year became the bane of my students’ (and their
