"The masked man was waiting for Jeremy at home. Jeremy wasn't scared. What is happening?"
-Our First Story with a Hole (The answer is at the end of this post: Stay tuned...)
This is a story that you may have heard your child telling at the beginning of last year. It is a riddle of sorts, and when I tell these stories to the class, it is one of the times of day where it truly feels like we are all working hard to engage a challenge together. However, I tell them for more than simply allowing us to experience our bond once again. I tell these stories because of how we solve them. We call these stories "Stories with a Hole." The "hole" is referencing something being left out. In each story, some part of the context is missing, a part that would make the other pieces and parts make more sense together.
When trying to establish context for the story, the rules are that the listeners can only ask the leader questions that end with a yes or a no. I will often give hints if I feel like we are going down a path that will not be productive and sometimes to help guide our thinking I will answer with "irrelevant" to let the group know when a question may be heading down a path that will not lead to the context at hand. These rules set up a kind of thinking that some philosophers and educators call lateral thinking, and it is thinking that requires a kind of creativity.
Whenever a story is told or a statement is made, we nearly immediately interpret a meaning from it with a full context and often a set of secondary characters firmly rooted in our personal experiences. This process of very quickly assigning context often help us to communicate effortlessly with people who have had similar experiences, but such quick decision making easily closes our minds to other options or communications with people who are different from ourselves.
One might imagine that expanding the possibilities for how we could perceive an old situation in new ways to be beneficial to us in any number of ways. The scientist who is practiced in thinking laterally might be the one to notice a pattern in the data that no one else saw. The mathematician who thinks laterally, finding new ways to solve old problems, may be able to identify a solution to unsolved problems or even locate the new problems themselves. The historian who is practiced in thinking laterally could be the one to seek, find, and share historical points of view that had never been featured before. Finding the new requires us going beyond the assumed or typical. It requires that we take in new data in the world around us and change our minds about what we thought we knew. It requires that we listen carefully and look carefully for the things we'd never noticed before.
As our fifth graders head off into the world, we seek to support them in finding and creating the new. These puzzles are not just fun, they are a way to collectively practice seeing differently. They allow us a shared experience in knowing what we know and seeking what we don't. They are the mental gymnastics necessary to become flexible and strong as people who routinely let go of one idea for an idea that fits the data better. They are, indeed, also fun. They are often called Lateral Thinking Puzzles or Situation Puzzles as well. Look up some and enjoy them with your family, or ask your fifth grader to lead some of those that we've already done.You might even see a new way to notice for yourself!
Answer: Jeremy was playing baseball. He just hit a home run over the fence. The masked man was the umpire waiting at home plate.
