How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

Petruchio

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

There are things which are mysterious and difficult. There are things which even many experts in a field might not understand. I suppose my "good" attitude towards my teachers and my education may come from my appreciation of the facts that there is a lot to know and at the same time, no one knows close to everything about anything.

I am a physicist and I read your description above, and I can easily put myself in the place of the teacher. The total energy in the gravitational system is indeed conservative. Whether or not the total system in our actual universe is open or closed is a real question. How it got that way? Who knows how the universe started, even the big bang doesn't give a hint what was going on a second before the big bang started.

I can imagine telling a student who persisted in asking about these puzzles that they are indeed puzzles and what we could know is what we did know about the equations, and we were not going to use any more class time noticing they were puzzles, we were going to move on.

I'm sorry if that doesn't work for every student. I'm not sure though that there is anything that WILL work for every student.

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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