On Teaching, Difficult Questions, and the Slow Erasure of Wonder
Mechelle Marie Gilford Ed.S. NBCT
When did we decide that a student sitting in genuine uncertainty was a problem to be solved?
I don’t mean the uncertainty of confusion — the glazed look, the quiet panic before an exam. I mean the other kind: the student who has just been asked something they cannot answer quickly, and knows it, and is leaning in anyway. That particular silence, electric and fertile, the sound of a mind actually moving. I have come to think of it as one of the most valuable things that can happen in a classroom. And I have watched, over years of teaching, as we have slowly been trained to treat it as a failure of instruction.
I want to write about that. About the questions, and about writing — specifically the kind of writing I once tried to encourage in my students, the kind that no longer seems to have a home in the institution I work within.
The Questions Teachers Ask
Oliver Sacks once wrote about a patient who could no longer recognize faces — not even his own in a mirror — and he described it with a kind of loving precision that never felt clinical. He was fascinated. He was troubled. He wanted to understand, but he also wanted to feel what it was like to be that person, to inhabit the mystery alongside them. That combination — rigorous curiosity and radical empathy — was the engine of everything he wrote.
I think of this when I remember the questions that first pulled me into teaching. The ones that had no clean answer. Why do some children thrive in chaos and wither in order? What does a student actually experience in the moment before they give up? What are we really asking when we ask someone to sit still for six hours and absorb information they did not request? These questions came from the same impulse as Sacks’s work: the sense that beneath every observable behavior was a story worth attending to.
Good teachers ask hard questions. Not trick questions, not gotcha questions — but the kind that open something up rather than close it down. The kind you can sit inside. I was lucky to have a few such teachers, and I remember them not for what they taught me but for the feeling of being taken seriously as a thinking creature.