If You Really Want to Understand Something

Two preschoolers were in an intellectual debate over the size of elephants.

"They're huge!" one insisted. "As big as those trees."

"No they aren't," the other responded, "Dinosaurs are the biggest animals."

"Some dinosaurs are tiny!" He held his fingers together to indicate the size of an ant.

"T-Rexes are giant." He threw his arms into the air to indicate infinite size.

"Elephants are giant." He threw his arms into the air, while lifting up on his toes to indicate a size beyond infinity.

As the adult, I had information that would have helped settled the argument, if only by virtue of the natural authority an adult has in the presence of children. I knew that if they were going to sort things out, they would have to discuss concepts like relative sizes and living v. extinct. They would need to agree upon what was meant by "huge" and "giant." And then, finally, they would need some sort of agreed upon authority or reference to confirm their assertions. As a "teacher" in a standard school, I imagine I might have felt an obligation to make this moment "educational" by walking them through a process with the goal of finding the "right answer."

But being a teacher in a play based preschool, right answers aren't necessarily to goal: thinking is. I'd moved nearby because I knew both of these boys quite well. I knew were both passionate about the natural world. Their parents had read many of the same books to them and they both watched some of the same shows. This abiding interest was what attracted them to one another as playmates. I also knew that both boys sometimes let their passion could get the best of them and it wouldn't be the first time their disagreements resulted in a physical altercation. I was close so that I was in position to step in should violence emerge, but as far as the content of their debate, I remained neutral even if what I heard wasn't entirely accurate.

"(I)f you really want to understand something," wrote Douglas Adams, "the best way is to try to explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind."

"Dinosaurs have cold blood!"

"Elephants are mammals!"

The Ancient Greeks understood this phenomenon very well. Most of what we know about Socrates was through his "dialogs." Indeed, the Socratic Method isn't one of direct instruction, but rather of asking probing, open-ended questions intended to help students sort it out in their minds. I considered interjecting myself in this way, but at the same time, I wasn't entirely sure where this dialog was headed. When I'd arrived on the scene it had been about relative size, but now it felt like they were feeling their way toward something else. Their apparent non-sequiturs were perhaps not non-sequiturs at all, but rather steps along a path to understanding . . . something.

"Dinosaurs are reptiles!"

"Yeah, dinosaurs are reptiles."

The heat suddenly went out of their dialog.

"Some dinosaurs are huge."

"Like T-Rexes."

"And some dinosaurs are small."

"Yeah, and elephants are huge . . . But not the babies. They're small."

"Babies are small. Grown-ups are big." He then turned to me, "Teacher Tom, did you know you're big?"

I nodded, "I'm pretty big."

"Yeah, but not as big as an elephant . . . Not even a baby!

The boys laughed at the absurdity of me, a grown up, being smaller than a baby. The dialog was fare from over as the boys continued to share their knowledge with one another, but I have no idea where their collaborative thinking, their cobbling together of understanding, ultimately took them because with the heat dissipated, I was no longer necessary.

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