Why Kids Love Silly Elementary School Debates: Tips For Parents And Teachers
I was on lunch duty last Wednesday, leaning against the chipped blue playground fence, sipping a coffee that had gone lukewarm half an hour earlier, when a pack of fourth graders barrelled over, yelling so loud I could barely make out words. Mia, the group’s de facto leader, grabbed my wrist and said, “Ms. L, you have to settle this. We’ve been arguing for 20 minutes.” The question they brought me: If you eat a tiny bite of yourself every day until there’s nothing left, do you disappear completely, or end up twice as big because you ate all of yourself?
I almost laughed out loud. It sounded exactly like the debates I got into when I was their age. When I was in second grade, our class spent a full week of recess arguing about whether the sky was actually blue, or just painted that color with a giant paintbrush. One kid named Tyler swore his cousin went to camp in the mountains and climbed a high enough hill that he felt the brush strokes on the sky. We split into two teams, Painted Sky vs. Real Blue, and even had a secret vote during art class that ended in a 12-12 tie. Our teacher just shook her head and told us to get back to our handprint turkeys for the Thanksgiving bulletin board. I don’t think she realized how hard our brains were working just to hash that out.
When I first started teaching, I would’ve done the exact same thing. I would’ve laughed, said “that’s such a silly question, go play four square” and sent them on their way. I thought these debates were just a waste of time, mindless kid stuff that didn’t matter when we had reading levels to hit and math worksheets to finish. But after a few years in the classroom, I started noticing what’s actually going on when kids argue about these impossible, nonsensical questions.
Elementary school is the first time kids can really wrap their heads around hypotheticals. Before that, they’re mostly thinking about things that are right in front of them: this cookie is sweet, that slide is too high, my sock has a hole in it. But between first and fifth grade, their brains start working with “what if” questions that don’t have a clear, real-world answer. These silly debates are the first time they get to practice building an argument, testing logic, and listening to someone else’s point of view without getting a grade for it. They’re not being stupid. They’re practicing critical thinking with low stakes. No one’s going to fail if their take on the eating-yourself paradox is wrong, so it feels safe to test out ideas.
So what do you actually do when your kid or student drops one of these questions on you? First, don’t shut it down immediately. You don’t have to entertain a 45-minute argument if you’re trying to get out the door for school, but you don’t have to call it silly or brush it off either. If you’ve got two minutes to spare, just ask one simple question: “What makes you think that?” That’s it, no fancy lesson plan needed. When I asked the fourth graders that last week, every single one of them had a clear, logical (for them) reason backing up their take. Javi, who said you’d disappear, explained that if every bite you eat removes a part of you, eventually there’s no part left to be you. Mia, who said you’d grow twice as big, brought up what she learned in science the week before: all food gives you calories that make your body grow, so your own body parts are food, so they’d make you bigger. No one was just yelling random stuff. They were connecting what they already knew to a new, weird question.
Second, don’t feel like you have to solve it. A lot of adults jump in to give the “right” answer, or pull out Google to end the argument as fast as possible. But the point isn’t the answer. The point is the arguing. If they pressure you to pick a side, you can just say, “I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this, which is why it’s fun to talk about.” Last month, my 8-year-old nephew asked my sister at dinner, “If I live in the United States and my cousin lives in Australia, are we both standing upside down?” She almost pulled up a YouTube video about gravity to explain it, then remembered what I told her, and just said, “What do you think?” They spent 20 minutes going back and forth, drawing lopsided diagrams on napkins, and by the end they still didn’t agree. But my nephew was asking questions about gravity and the shape of the earth that he never would’ve asked if she’d just given him the answer right away.
After the fourth graders finished taking turns explaining their takes, the bell rang to head back to class. Javi still insisted Mia was wrong as they lined up, and Mia threatened to sit with him at lunch the next day to keep arguing. I brushed the goldfish cracker a wandering first grader had dropped on my shoe off onto the blacktop, and watched them go. No one won, no one got a right answer, and that was fine.
A lot of people talk about how we need to teach kids to think critically, but we often forget that starts with letting them ask the stupid, unanswerable questions. I saw Tyler, the kid who swore the sky had brush strokes when we were in second grade, on Facebook a few months ago. He’s a graphic designer now, paints big, colorful murals for elementary schools across the state. I don’t know if he still thinks the sky is painted, but I like to think that long, silly debate we had back then didn’t do him any harm. Some days, I still walk by the playground and catch a new group huddled over another stupid debate: if you could change your name, would you change it to your favorite snack, and would that make the snack taste like you? I don’t stop them. I just keep walking, and let them figure it out on their own.
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