What I learned about "exploration" from crazy golf

Today my wife and I challenged my sister and her boyfriend to a game of mini-golf. We took my three-year-old and three-month-year old. Game on. Aside from teaching me that playing crazy golf with a three-year-old is hard, I learned something else. 

So three-year-old isn't a very competent golfer. None of my family are very good but she really does suck. Fair enough, she's three. She is a complete and utter novice golfer. We'd visited Jungle Safari Mini Golf once before but she mainly rode the giraffe on the 4th and threw her golf ball into the water on the 17th. She's also left-handed so that makes it even harder. On this occasion, she wanted to play but decided she would hold the golf club like a croquet bat and hit the ball with the thin end of the club head. She was very sure this was the best way to do it, swinging the club like a pendulum between her legs and nudging the ball forwards with the thinnest edge of the club. She might as well have been using a pool cue to hit the ball, such as was the effectiveness. Instead of using the wide, flat space we all know is *for* that purpose she had a unique and incredibly inefficient way of doing it. She might as well have been trying to eat soup with a fork. 

My first reaction was - jump in and show her how to do it properly. She was getting frustrated. Anyone with an imagination can see that trying to whack a golf ball up a hill and through a giant's legs without using the part of the club designed to actually hit the ball is going to be frustrating. I explained my thinking to my wife. “Love, let's tell her. She needs to know. We aren't doing her any favours.” My wife's reaction was the following. “No! She's exploring. She's having fun. She's going to discover how to do it on her own and that will be so much better. She’s building resilience and critical thinking.” Classic discovery learning arguments there. I explained I thought she would probably have a better time if she could actually hit the ball. No, leave her, the wife explained. My wife is a confident, charismatic Latino (as I hope my daughter will be) who is usually right so I wasn't going to fight it.

One hole later, after a couple of moments of lower lip-extension, tears of exasperation and throwing the club on the floor, we explained to her how to do it. It took a minute or so, some practice and constant reminders. The frustration disappeared, she could actually hit the ball, it was, surprise surprise, more fun for her. I made the rather tongue-in-cheek comment that this was the reason education in the west had been so rubbish for so long, people had been trying to work out how to do stuff on their own in the name of "student-centred-learning" or constructivism or something. At this point, my sister (22 so remembers school well) gave me a couple of unsolicited and yet enlightening examples from her own education. She remembered the French teacher who told the class the word for weather in French (La Meteo, before you google it) and then asked, "what do you think this means" for 20 minutes. Everyone guessed: nobody knew. Eventually, the teacher told them.  20 minutes had been wasted. Then, in year three a teacher told my sister that they were going to learn about force, "does anyone know what force is?" the teacher asked. Obviously, nobody knew what force was because no-one had yet been taught what force was. A few guesses based on an incomplete understanding of the concept were made. 30 minutes wasted.

Now if a three-year-old gets frustrated and disillusioned trying to work out how to use a golf club properly, how do we expect children who are just a bit older to work out for themselves how to multiply negative numbers? Or how to calculate the motion of forces? Why not just tell them? Ask them first to connect to prior knowledge, of course, but don't expect that they are doing to discover the answer without you directly and explicitly explaining to them how to do it. If you refuse to explain because of something vague about autonomy, expect kids to hate school. That should just be common sense, but unfortunately, in education circles, it's often considered bad practice to tell kids things. This is very silly and I'm glad "research" has been invoked to remind us of this rather obvious truth.

*oh and our team won the golf*