Minds

The first time I go to a new pre-college classroom, I usually begin by simply asking students what comes to their minds when they hear the word “philosophy.” It’s always fascinating to hear what they have to say; case in point: the students today, in Ms. Ward’s Fifth Grade class at Whittier Elementary.

One girl said she thought of “fossils” when she heard the word. Another, perhaps inspired by that comment, said “dinosaurs.” A boy said that what came to mind for him was ideas and controversy. His classmate countered that he couldn’t help thinking of old men.

I try to stress that I’m not looking for any particular answer; I really want to know what comes to their minds. What’s in their heads when they hear the word? This allows us to then begin right away wondering about thoughts, to think about thinking in other words.

I asked the students, drawing upon one of the aforementioned answers, to think of a dinosaur. Then, think of two dinosaurs, then a hundred. “Can you think of a thousand dinosaurs?” I asked. A girl responded, “Well, maybe not exactly a thousand; it’s not like I’m going to count them.”

I thought this was a great answer, and it lead perfectly into the next part of our lesson, which was to begin thinking about thoughts. We wondered together whether a thought of a thousand dinosaurs was bigger than a thought of just one dinosaur; most students said that it was.

I pointed out to the kids at this point that they were doing philosophy; “So,” I wondered aloud, “how many of you would say that you are a philosopher?” As is typical, hardly any students (in fact, I think not a one) raised his or her hand. I then said that I would present an argument to them for the conclusion that all of them are, in fact, philosophers.

“What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘argument’” I asked. “Two people fighting,” said one student. “My little sister,” said another. “Screaming and yelling,” said another. I praised them for their answers, but said that there is another sense of the term, one that doesn’t necessarily involve fighting; in this sense, “argument” simply means a way of trying to persuade someone of something. With that in mind, I said I was going to present to them an argument to convince that they were all philosophers.

What followed was an exercise that I have done lots and lots of time with students from third grade all the way through college. I help students see that they do what philosophers do, that they do it for the reason philosophers do it, and they can do it in the unusual way that philosophers typically do it.

That thing, of course, is thinking. Here’s a description of how the exercise works.

I think it worked well today; the students were really engaged with it, and in the third part of the activity, where they examine an everyday object from different perspectives, the suggestions they came up with were creative and, in some cases, hilarious.

We ended the day with a thought experiment exploring the idea of personal identity. What would happen, we wondered, if Dave’s mind was put into one of the student’s bodies and vice-versa? Where would the Dave-body go home to and why? This led to a lively discussion about what makes us what we are. I finished up by asking students to reflect on the question: “What makes me me?” Some of the answers they floated in conclusion were: “my thoughts,” “my experiences,” “my mind and my body combined,” “the things I like to do,” and “what other people think I am.”

Obviously, these students ARE philosophers.

Bigger Ones

While Philosophy for Children is generally done with children, I’ve also facilitated lots and lots of sessions with people who probably wouldn’t be categorized that way: college students mainly, but also parents, senior citizens, and even, informally, some of my friends who—chronologically, at least, are decades and decades away from childhood.

What’s sort of amazing is that the same stories, exercises, and activities tend to work just as well with people whose ages are double-digit crooked numbers as they do with folks who have yet to reach puberty. And that seems to support one of the central claims of P4C—that philosophy is something that we all do naturally given the opportunity and that providing such opportunities is meaningful and valuable to our shared experience.

I typically do a simple exercise when I first work with a group of students, no matter what age, that’s intended to explore the question, “Are you a philosopher?” The main part of the activity involves students working together in groups to examine a common, everyday item—usually a rotary cheese grater—and to brainstorm other things it could possibly be used for. (The idea here is to engage in the common philosophical practice of looking at things—whether tangible like cheese graters, or intangible, like ideas—from different perspectives.)

“Children of all ages” find this activity not only fun, but also philosophically compelling. It’s fascinating to see what participants come up with and even more interesting to hear them discuss the metaphysical question that inevitably emerges: what make something what it is?

We wonder together what it is that defines a thing: is it what it was designed for? Is it what it does best? Is it whatever you want it to be?

And then, with almost equal regularity, we segue into discussing what makes us who we are. Is it our history? Our parentage? Is personal identity a matter of choice? Or of destiny? How much freedom do we have to define ourselves? Do we have free will at all?

“Philosophy,” said Plato, “begins in wonder. And wonder is the attitude of a philosopher.” I must say it’s quite wonderful to observe this in people no matter what their ages.

LIttle Ones

Many people are surprised to hear that philosophy can be done with little kids; I’ve had some of my most rewarding and even intellectually stimulating philosophy sessions with students as young as six or seven. Doing philosophy with kindergarteners can be amazing for all involved—although you’ve got to be careful not to get the kids too wound up, and it can lead to a pretty wild classroom environment if you decide to have them all doing animal imitations at the same time.

One of my favorite books to use with pre-readers is Morris the Moose by Bernard Wiseman. It’s a picture book that tells the story of Morris, a moose who is, let us say, metaphysically challenged. In the course of his day, he meets a number of other animals and is convinced that they, like him, are moose. He comes to this conclusion because they, like him, have four legs and things on their heads.

So, for instance, he meets a deer and concludes that the deer is a moose. Why? Because it too has four legs and things on its head. Same with a cow.

This can lead into a fascinating conversation with young people about what makes something what it is. What makes a cow a cow? What makes a deer a deer?

In one class, a few years ago, we explored the question of whether a moose could be a deer. Students, in general, concluded that of course not, because a deer has deer parents and a moose has moose parents. And besides, they’re different sizes.

Well, I asked, could a sheep be a deer? No, argued one little boy; a sheep can’t be a deer because they don’t spend time together. Okay, I said, well, then what about a sheep and a dog? They often inhabit the same fields, for instance. But no, answered another student; a sheep can’t be a dog because they’re different colors. But, interjected the first student, “there is such a thing as a sheepdog!”

At the end of this reading/exercise, I usually have students do a fill-in-the-blank “poem.” The kids finish the sentence, “The difference between (one thing) and (another) is:…

Here’s what one kindergarten class wrote:

• The difference between...
• The difference between a moose and a deer is difference horns.
• The difference between a cown and a fish is one has antlers and the other has fins.
• The difference between lunch and dinner is that one is like a sandwhich and one is meat and stuff.
• The difference between a deer and a horse is that one has horns and one has none.
• The difference between coyote and a dog is that coyotes come out and night and dogs live at home.
• The difference between banana and a pineapple is that one is yellow and curved.
• The difference between otter and a moose is that otters and tails and swim in the water and moose only drink water.
• The difference between head and a foot is that your head sits on your neck and your foot sits on your legs.
• The difference between Batman and Spiderman is that Batman has horns on his suit and Spiderman spits out webs.
• The difference between shoes and boots is that shoes are smaller.
• The difference between tables and chairs is that they go together.
• The difference between easel and a desk is that you don’t write on a desk.
• The difference between fingers and toes is that your fingers are on your hands and your toes are on your feet.
• The difference between a cow and a deer is that a cow goes “moo.”
• The difference between sitting and standing is that sitting is criss-cross applesauce.
• The difference between a deer and a horse is that a horse goes “neigh.”
• The difference between teeth and lips is that your teeth are on the inside and your lips on the outside.

Change

At the American Philosophical Association Western Division Convention later this month in San Diego, I’ll be presenting a talk about how teaching philosophy to pre-college students has changed my college teaching. This should be interesting—to me, at least—because in many ways, it hasn’t really changed it at all.

Rather, teaching philosophy to kindergarten through high school students has pretty much DEFINED how I teach philosophy to college students. So it’s not as if the experience has changed what I do so much as it has determined it.

If I were going to identify one aspect of my teaching that pervades what I do with both younger students and older ones it would be to emphasize that philosophy can’t be studied passively; it must be done actively. You’ve got to ask questions—ones that intrigue you—and pursue them, ideally in discussion with others. You’ve got to try out ideas and see where they take you. You’ve got to stake out positions and argue for them, but just as importantly, be willing to let go of a belief you’ve previously held if a better one comes along.

I like to make students do things: build something together, figure out a puzzle in groups, at least get up and move around the room, but I’m also a fan of the traditional “community of inquiry” method where you simply read aloud a text, have the students generate questions about it, and then discuss those questions.

This week, in my UW class, we’ll be exploring topics in Philosophy of Mind. The key puzzles have to do with the nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and the brain. We’ll read a selection from Matthew Lipman’s book, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery in which the characters in the story ponder what is happening when you get a song stuck in your head that keeps repeating over and over.

Anyone who’s lain awake at 3:00 in the morning staring at the ceiling above their bed knows what this is like: the thoughts and questions just keep bubbling up, no matter how hard you try to make them stop.

That’s doing philosophy, whether you like it or not.

Spring

Today officially begins my spring quarter sabbatical, a period when I will be concentrating on my research work in the practice of Philosophy for Children, an activity I’ve been seriously engaged in for about fifteen years, ever since I was a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Washington, deep in pre-dissertation angst, wondering what the hell I was doing spending eight to ten hours a day reading esoteric and often incomprehensible philosophy texts and desperately trying to find any connection between this activity and some sort of meaning and purpose in the real world.

So I began volunteering in a 5th grade class at T.T. Minor Elementary School near my house in Seattle, at first without any particular intention of doing philosophy with the students. Eventually, though, after a few classes, the teacher, Mr. Reed, invited me to begin facilitating philosophical discussions with his class.

The first few times were chaotic and unpredictable; once the kids got so loud that the teacher next door came into the room and asked me to make them quiet down; after a couple of months, though, we began to have quite intense and meaningful discussions about the nature of truth, knowledge, justice, beauty, and a whole array of other issues that have intrigued philosophers from time immemorial.

My graduate student college, Jana Mohr, who founded the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, introduced me to the curriculum of materials for doing P4C developed by the International Association for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, but I also developed dozens of classroom activities and readings on my own—in conjunction, of course, with the students I was working with.

I went regularly to T.T. Minor for a couple of years and have subsequently, worked with scores of schools and hundreds of students all around the Puget Sound. And indeed my experience working with pre-college students was instrumental in my landing a fulltime tenure-track job teaching philosophy at Cascadia Community College, where I’m now based.

This quarter, on my sabbatical, I plan to visit at least one or two pre-college classrooms a week where I hope to try out some new lessons with students in grades three through five.

I’m also presenting papers about doing P4C at a couple of conferences, first, the American Philosophical Association Western Division meeting in April, and then, second, the PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) Institute conference at Columbia College in New York in June.

Mostly, though, I hope to deepen and broaden my experience and skill in doing philosophy with kids. There’s nothing quite so exciting about exploring big ideas with little people.

It’s not, as was my Winter Quarter sabbatical, India, but I guarantee that it’s equally exotic and mind-blowing in its own way.

Letting Go

This is what happens when you devote all your energy to desperately clinging to the memory of Mysore and the quality of yoga practice you managed in a life where nothing else matters: you strain your neck pushing yourself to the limit in headstand so that when you wake up the next morning, you can barely tilt your head but a few inches to the left; it hurts, of course, but not as much as knowing that you’re doing this to yourself in a misguided effort to resist the inevitable re-entry into real life.

It seems to me that one’s yoga practice has to find its way to be integrated fully into one’s quotidian existence; what this little setback is reminds me is to practice in conjunction with where I am.

What that will look like is hard to see, but it’s certain it won’t be the same here in cool and green Seattle as it was in hot and brown India.

That’s fine and good and the way it should be; one simply has to let go of that which is being clung to; release the neck and shoulders, and breathe deep of the rich Northwest air.

And so, with that, this first Winter quarter edition of Sabblogtical comes to a close; after March 28, when Spring quarter starts, it will be back, with discussion more related to the activity of Philosophy for Children, which is my stated focus for April through May.

Eyeballing

If you take this yoga business seriously, then it’s pretty serious business. Here’s how the brilliant 20th century writer Christopher Isherwood puts it in An Approach to Vedanta:

“…Yoga is the process of exploring your own nature; of finding out what it really is. It is the process of becoming aware of your real situation. The day-to-day space-time “reality” (as it is reported to us by our senses and the daily newspapers) is, in fact, no reality at all but a deadly and cunning illusion. The practice of yoga meditation consists in excluding, as far as possible, our consciousness of the illusory world, the surface “reality,” and turning the mind inward in search of its real nature. Our real nature is to be one with life, with consciousness, with everything else in the universe. The fact of oneness is the real situation.”

Huh. You don’t say.

So it’s not just a way to get your abs in shape, or to sweat out the toxins of last night’s partying; it’s not even merely a way to find peace of mind and true happiness—although that may follow indirectly.

If Isherwood is right (and the odds of that are reasonably good; he was a literary genius, a student and co-translator of Sanskrit texts with Swami Prabhavananda, who hung out with folks like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell) then yoga is mainly a way of seeing things as they really are; it’s a tool for discernment and clarity, a means of getting a better picture of reality.

As someone who’s been very myopic ever since about second grade, and is now, as a middle-aged man, increasingly presbyopic, too, I know all about the importance of devices that help you see; eyeglasses are serious business, too, but what's even better about the Ashtanga yoga prescription—“take these poses 6 times a week and don’t call me in the morning”—is that it never requires me to go to the optometrist and have drops put in my eyes.